Centre of Excellence PLECO (Plants and Ecosystems), Department of Biology, University of Antwerp, 2610 Wilrijk, Belgium.
Department of Ecological Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
FEMS Microbiol Ecol. 2020 Mar 1;96(3). doi: 10.1093/femsec/fiaa018.
Although ongoing research has revealed some of the main drivers behind global spatial patterns of microbial communities, spatio-temporal dynamics of these communities still remain largely unexplored. Here, we investigate spatio-temporal variability of both bacterial and eukaryotic soil microbial communities at local and intercontinental scales. We compare how temporal variation in community composition scales with spatial variation in community composition, and explore the extent to which bacteria, protists, fungi and metazoa have similar patterns of temporal community dynamics. All soil microbial groups displayed a strong correlation between spatial distance and community dissimilarity, which was related to the ratio of organism to sample size. Temporal changes were variable, ranging from equal to local between-sample variation, to as large as that between communities several thousand kilometers apart. Moreover, significant correlations were found between bacterial and protist communities, as well as between protist and fungal communities, indicating that these microbial groups change in tandem, potentially driven by interactions between them. We conclude that temporal variation can be considerable in soil microbial communities, and that future studies need to consider temporal variation in order to reliably capture all drivers of soil microbiome changes.
尽管正在进行的研究揭示了微生物群落全球空间格局的一些主要驱动因素，但这些群落的时空动态仍在很大程度上未被探索。在这里，我们在局部和洲际尺度上调查了细菌和真土壤微生物群落的时空可变性。我们比较了群落组成的时间变化与空间变化的比例，探讨了细菌、原生动物、真菌和后生动物在时间上群落动态方面具有相似模式的程度。所有土壤微生物群都显示出空间距离与群落差异之间的强烈相关性，这与生物体与样本大小的比例有关。时间变化是可变的，从与局部样本间变异相等，到与相距数千公里的群落之间的差异一样大。此外，还发现细菌和原生动物群落之间以及原生动物和真菌群落之间存在显著相关性，表明这些微生物群是相互关联的，可能是由它们之间的相互作用驱动的。我们的结论是，土壤微生物群落中的时间变化可能相当大，未来的研究需要考虑时间变化，以便可靠地捕捉土壤微生物组变化的所有驱动因素。
