Abstract
The elevational diversity pattern for microorganisms has received great attention recently but is still understudied, and phylogenetic relatedness is rarely studied for microbial elevational distributions. Using a bar-coded pyrosequencing technique, we examined the biodiversity patterns for soil bacterial communities of tundra ecosystem along 2000–2500 m elevations on Changbai Mountain in China. Bacterial taxonomic richness displayed a linear decreasing trend with increasing elevation. Phylogenetic diversity and mean nearest taxon distance (MNTD) exhibited a unimodal pattern with elevation. Bacterial communities were more phylogenetically clustered than expected by chance at all elevations based on the standardized effect size of MNTD metric. The bacterial communities differed dramatically among elevations, and the community composition was significantly correlated with soil total carbon (TC), total nitrogen, C:N ratio, and dissolved organic carbon. Multiple ordinary least squares regression analysis showed that the observed biodiversity patterns strongly correlated with soil TC and C:N ratio. Taken together, this is the first time that a significant bacterial diversity pattern has been observed across a small-scale elevational gradient. Our results indicated that soil carbon and nitrogen contents were the critical environmental factors affecting bacterial elevational distribution in Changbai Mountain tundra. This suggested that ecological niche-based environmental filtering processes related to soil carbon and nitrogen contents could play a dominant role in structuring bacterial communities along the elevational gradient.
Highlights
Mountainsides often provide a natural laboratory for studies of biodiversity and biogeography (Lomolino, 2001; Rahbek, 2005)
We investigated soil bacterial biodiversity along the elevation of 2000–2500 m in Changbai Mountain tundra to address the following questions: (1) if there is a significant trend in bacterial diversity along this small-scale elevational gradient, (2) what environmental factors are closely related to bacterial community composition in tundra soils with similar pH
Testing by analysis of similarities (ANOSIM) revealed that OTU-based taxonomic community composition differed significantly among elevations
Summary
Mountainsides often provide a natural laboratory for studies of biodiversity and biogeography (Lomolino, 2001; Rahbek, 2005). Studies on the microbial ecology of these environments are rare, and the state of knowledge is generally rudimentary It is so far unclear whether there is any consistent trend in soil bacterial diversity. Other studies found no apparent trend with elevation for bacteria or ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (Zhang et al, 2009; Fierer et al, 2011; Shen et al, 2013; Xu et al, 2014; Yuan et al, 2014). All of these studies focused on a complete or large-scale elevational gradient, with relatively large elevational intervals and contrasting ecosystems. There has been no research addressing microbial diversity and community composition of a consistent ecosystem within a small-scale elevational gradient
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