Abstract
Understanding ecological linkages between above- and below-ground biota is critical for deepening our knowledge on the maintenance and stability of ecosystem processes. Nevertheless, direct comparisons of plant-microbe diversity at the community level remain scarce due to the knowledge gap between microbial ecology and plant ecology. We compared the α- and β- diversities of plant and soil bacterial communities in two temperate forests that represented early and late successional stages. We documented different patterns of aboveground-belowground diversity relationships in these forests. We observed no linkage between plant and bacterial α-diversity in the early successional forest, and even a negative correlation in the late successional forest, indicating that high bacterial α-diversity is not always linked to high plant α-diversity. Beta-diversity coupling was only found at the late successional stage, while in the early successional forest, the bacterial β-diversity was closely correlated with soil property distances. Additionally, we showed that the dominant competitive tree species in the late successional forest may play key roles in driving forest succession by shaping the soil bacterial community in the early successional stage. This study sheds new light on the potential aboveground-belowground linkage in natural ecosystems, which may help us understand the mechanisms that drive ecosystem succession.
Highlights
Plants provide the organic carbon required by the decomposer subsystem, and the decomposer subsystem in turn breaks down dead plant material and indirectly regulates plant growth and community composition by determining the supply of available soil nutrients[1]
The uncoupling of plant and microbial diversity was reported at the BioCON grassland field experiment[13], in which higher arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) spore richness was observed in the lower plant species richness treatment
The exact reverse pattern was found in the Broad-leaved Korean pine (BLKP) forest, where bacterial richness was negatively correlated with tree species richness (r = − 0.276, P = 0 .007; Fig. 1a)
Summary
Plants (producers) provide the organic carbon required by the decomposer subsystem, and the decomposer subsystem in turn breaks down dead plant material and indirectly regulates plant growth and community composition by determining the supply of available soil nutrients[1]. To the best of our knowledge, only one published study directly compared the aboveground-belowground β -diversity in the western Amazon rainforest in Peru[15]. The positive correlation between the diversity of host-specific microbial groups, such as AMF3,9,17 and nitrogen-fixing bacteria[12,18], and overall plant productivity was previously reported in grassland ecosystems. Owing to the conflicting results in the plant-microbe α -diversity relationship and the limited number of studies of aboveground-belowground β -diversity connections in natural forest ecosystems, we would like to more directly address the following questions in the present study: Is high belowground (α -, β -) diversity necessarily correlated with high aboveground diversity? We attempted to determine whether the abundance or productivity of specific tree species contributed to shaping the belowground bacterial communities
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