Abstract
We are living in a new epoch—the Anthropocene, in which human activity is reshaping global biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. Increasing efforts are being made toward a better understanding of the associations between human activity and the geographic patterns in plant and animal communities. However, similar efforts are rarely applied to microbial communities. Here, we collected 472 forest soil samples across eastern China, and the bacterial and fungal communities in those samples were determined by high-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene and internal transcribed spacer region, respectively. By compiling human impact variables as well as climate and soil variables, our goal was to elucidate the association between microbial richness and human activity when climate and soil variables are taken into account. We found that soil microbial richness was associated with human activity. Specifically, human population density was positively associated with the richness of bacteria, nitrifying bacteria and fungal plant pathogens, but it was negatively associated with the richness of cellulolytic bacteria and ectomycorrhizal fungi. Together, these results suggest that the associations between geographic variations of soil microbial richness and human activity still persist when climate and soil variables are taken into account and that these associations vary among different microbial taxonomic and functional groups.
Highlights
Ecosystems are being rapidly degraded due to increasing human population size, economic growth, urbanization, and pollution (Venter et al, 2016; Vitousek et al, 1995)
After statistically taking climate and soil variables into account, we aimed to explore how human activity was associated with the geographic variations of bacterial and fungal richness and how these associations varied among different microbial functional groups
Human activity explained a unique portion of the variations in soil microbial richness, and it shared a part of explained variation with climate, soil, and space (Figure 1)
Summary
Ecosystems are being rapidly degraded due to increasing human population size, economic growth, urbanization, and pollution (Venter et al, 2016; Vitousek et al, 1995). These unprecedented human activities are causing exceptional rates of modification in atmospheric composition, climate, soil fertility, and land use (Bai et al, 2017) and progressively reshaping the spatial distribution and community structure of various organisms (Gossner et al, 2016) as well as their associated ecosystem services (Mitchell et al, 2015). Given that geographic pattern of species richness is frequently found to be environmentally dependent (Stein et al, 2014) and human activity is widely identified as a major cause of current environmental changes (Bai et al, 2017; Fang et al, 2018; Song et al, 2018), it is expected that human activity shapes the geographic variation of species richness through its associations with environmental factors (D’agata et al, 2014; Torres-Romero and OlallaTarraga, 2015)
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