CAS Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun, Yunnan, China.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Mol Ecol. 2023 Dec;32(23):6294-6303. doi: 10.1111/mec.16585. Epub 2022 Jul 13.
To understand soil biodiversity we need to know how soil communities are assembled. However, the relationship between soil community assembly and environmental factors, and the linkages between soil microbiota taxonomic groups and their body sizes, remain unexplored in tropical seasonal rainforests. Systematic and stratified random sampling was used to collect 243 soil and organism samples across a 20-ha plot in a tropical seasonal rainforest in southwestern China. High-throughput sequencing, variation analysis and principal coordinates of neighbourhood matrices were performed. Soil community composition, spatial distribution and assembly processes based on propagule size (including archaea, bacteria, fungi and nematodes) were investigated. The results showed that: (i) the community assembly of small soil microorganisms (bacteria, fungi) was mostly influenced by stochastic processes while that of larger soil organisms (nematodes) was more deterministic; (ii) the independent effects of habitat (including soil and topographic variables) and its interaction with plant attributes for community structure significantly decreased with increasing body size; and (iii) plant leaf phosphorus directly influenced the spatial distribution of soil-available phosphorus, which indicates their indirect impact on the assembly of the soil communities. Our data suggest that the assembly of multitrophic soil communities can be explained to some extent by changes in above-ground plant attributes. This highlights the importance of above- and below-ground linkages in influencing multitrophic soil microbiota community assembly.
为了了解土壤生物多样性，我们需要知道土壤群落是如何组合的。然而，土壤群落组合与环境因素之间的关系，以及土壤微生物分类群与其体型之间的联系，在热带季节性雨林中仍未得到探索。本研究采用系统和分层随机采样方法，在中国西南部的一个热带季节性雨林中 20 公顷的样地内收集了 243 个土壤和生物样本。进行了高通量测序、变异分析和邻接矩阵主坐标分析。研究了基于繁殖体大小（包括古菌、细菌、真菌和线虫）的土壤群落组成、空间分布和组装过程。结果表明：（i）小土壤微生物（细菌、真菌）的群落组装主要受随机过程影响，而较大的土壤生物（线虫）的群落组装则更具确定性；（ii）生境（包括土壤和地形变量）及其与植物属性的相互作用对群落结构的独立影响随着体型的增大而显著减小；（iii）植物叶片磷直接影响土壤有效磷的空间分布，这表明它们间接影响土壤群落的组装。我们的数据表明，多营养土壤群落的组装在一定程度上可以通过地上植物属性的变化来解释。这强调了地上和地下联系在影响多营养土壤微生物群落组装中的重要性。
