Bridging ecological processes to diversity formation and functional profiles in belowground bacterial communities
Chen, Beibei, Ziheng Peng, Shi Chen, Yu Liu, Jiejun Qi, Haibo Pan, Hang Gao, Jiamin Gao, Chunling Liang, Jiai Liu, Xun Qian, Xiao Zhang, Sanfeng Chen, Jizhong Zhou, Gehong Wei and Shuo Jiao
Soil Biology & Biochemistry
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soilbio.2024.109573
ABSTRACT
Revealing the generation and maintenance of biodiversity is a central goal in ecology, but how dispersal, selection, and regional taxon pool size shape soil microbial communities is not well understood. Here, we examined how dispersal and environmental selection affected soil bacterial diversity and their related metabolic functions by leveraging large-scale cross-biome soil surveys of similar to 1400 samples from diverse ecosystems across China, including agricultural, forest, grassland, and wetland soils. Our results showed that high dispersal increased alpha-diversity and decreased beta-diversity, whereas strong selection generated the opposite pattern in various ecosystems. This is likely due to dispersal enabling species access to otherwise unreachable habitats, and environmental selection excluding non-adapted species from communities. The alpha-diversity increased with gamma-diversity, whereas beta-diversity did not covary. We also showed that bacterial phylotypes positively associated with dispersal and selection exhibited distinct metabolic diversity. Dispersal-induced phylotypes, which were abundant in agricultural soils, exhibited more metabolic diversity in fructose and mannose, starch and sucrose, and nitrogen metabolism. Conversely, selection-induced phylotypes, dominated in wetland soils, were primarily associated with sulfur and methane metabolism. In addition, the complexity of taxon associations increased when communities had higher selection increasing beta-diversity. Our study establishes the predictive links of ecological processes to microbial diversity, metabolic functions, and taxon coexistence, thus facilitating a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying biodiversity generation and conservation.