Distinct mechanisms shape prokaryotic community assembly across different land-use intensification

Abstract

Changes in land-use intensity can have a far-reaching impact on river water quality and prokaryotic community composition. While research has been conducted to investigate the assembly mechanism of prokaryotic communities, the contributions of neutral theory and niche theory to prokaryotic community assembly under different land-use intensities remain unknown. In this study, a total of 251 sampling sites were set up in the Yangtze River basin to explore the assembly mechanism under different land-use intensities. Briefly, a "source" landscape can generate pollution, whereas a "sink" landscape can prevent pollution. Firstly, our result showed that higher land-use intensity might disturb the balance between the "source" and "sink" landscape patterns, resulting in water quality deterioration. Then the prokaryotic community assembly was classified into five ecological processes, namely homogeneous selection, homogenizing dispersal, undominated processes, dispersal limitation, and variable selection. The higher land-use intensity was found to strengthen the homogeneous selection, leading to the homogenization of the community at the whole basin scale. Finally, our findings demonstrated that the Yangtze River Basin's prokaryotic community displayed a distance-decay pattern when land-use intensity was low, with a greater contribution from neutral theory to its assembly. On the other hand, with a higher land-use intensity, the degradation of the aquatic environment increased the impacts of environmental filtering on the prokaryotic community, and niche theory played a stronger role in its assembly. Our findings show how land-use intensity influence the formation of prokaryotic communities, which will be an invaluable guide for managing land use and understanding the prokaryotic community assembly mechanisms in the Yangtze River Basin.