Deterministic processes dominate soil microbial community assembly in subalpine coniferous forests on the Loess Plateau

PeerJ

article

Pengyu Zhao¹  Jiabing Bao¹  Xue Wang¹  Yi Liu³  Cui Li³  Baofeng Chai¹ 

[1] Institute of Loess Plateau, Shanxi University;Shanxi Key laboratory of Ecological Restoration of Loess Plateau;College of Resources and Environment, Shanxi University of Finance and Economics

关键词: Ecological process;    Community assembly;    Phylogenetic structure;    Soil microbial community;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.6746

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

Microbial community assembly is influenced by a continuum (actually the trade-off) between deterministic and stochastic processes. An understanding of this ecological continuum is of great significance for drawing inferences about the effects of community assembly processes on microbial community structure and function. Here, we investigated the driving forces of soil microbial community assembly in three different environmental contexts located on subalpine coniferous forests of the Loess Plateau in Shanxi, China. The variation in null deviations and phylogenetic analysis showed that a continuum existed between deterministic and stochastic processes in shaping the microbial community structure, but deterministic processes prevailed. By integrating the results of redundancy analysis (RDA), multiple regression tree (MRT) analysis and correlation analysis, we found that soil organic carbon (SOC) was the main driver of the community structure and diversity patterns. In addition, we also found that SOC had a great influence on the community assembly processes. In conclusion, our results show that deterministic processes always dominated assembly processes in shaping bacterial community structure along the three habitat contexts.

【 授权许可】

CC BY