Abstract
Archaea play vital roles in global biogeochemical cycles, particularly in nitrification and methanogenesis. The recovery of archaeal community following disturbance is essential for maintaining the stability of ecosystem function. To examine whether the archaeal community could recover from water flooding and assess the influence of anthropogenic pollution on the autogenic recovery, soil samples from two riparian zones with contrasting pollution background were investigated. Collected samples in each area were divided into three groups of reference, flooding, and recovery according to the flooded state of each site. The results showed that the archaeal abundance was resilient to the disturbances of both water flooding and anthropogenic pollution. More similar community composition and diversity appeared between the recovery and reference groups in the area with low anthropogenic pollution. It indicated that high anthropogenic pollution could result in less resilience of archaeal community. The co-occurrence network further revealed that the archaeal community in the area of low anthropogenic pollution exhibited more associations suggesting a higher ecosystem stability. The better recovery of archaeal community was associated with the high resilience ability. The Nitrososphaerales was the key taxon maintaining the better recovery of the archaeal community from the disturbances due to its high resilience index and quantitative dominance. Overall, archaeal community has the capability of autogenic recovery, the process of which might be intervened by anthropogenic pollution, and then potentially affects the ecosystem functions of the riparian system.
Highlights
Microbial community composition is critical for predicting rates of ecosystem processes, which is often ignored comparing with plant (Allison and Martiny, 2008)
The higher anthropogenic impact in AA increased the content of Organic matter (OM), total carbon (TC), total nitrogen (TN), and C/N ratio significantly (Mann–Whitney U-test, P < 0.05, Figure 2)
Water flooding significantly increased the soil TC, total sulfur (TS), Fe2+/Fe3+, and Fe2+ in AA (Mann– Whitney U-test, P < 0.05), whereas no significant differences were observed in natural area (NA) (Supplementary Figure S2)
Summary
Microbial community composition is critical for predicting rates of ecosystem processes, which is often ignored comparing with plant (Allison and Martiny, 2008). Microbial communities respond more rapidly than plant communities to changing environmental conditions (Harris, 2009), and play central roles in ecosystem processes in many ways, such as driving the Recovery of Soil Archaeal Communities. The measurements of soil microbial community structure and composition are increasingly being applied to assess the response of ecosystems to disturbances and as an indicator of ecosystem recovery (Harris, 2003; van Dijk et al, 2009; Lewis et al, 2010). The anthropogenic disturbance and dry/wet cycles are two major environmental disturbances regulating the soil microbial composition and dynamics
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