Abstract
Seasonality, an exogenous driver, motivates the biological and ecological temporal dynamics of animal and plant communities. Underexplored microbial temporal endogenous dynamics hinders the prediction of microbial response to climate change. To elucidate temporal dynamics of microbial communities, temporal turnover rates, phylogenetic relatedness, and species interactions were integrated to compare those of a series of forest ecosystems along latitudinal gradients. The seasonal turnover rhythm of microbial communities, estimated by the slope (w value) of similarity-time decay relationship, was spatially structured across the latitudinal gradient, which may be caused by a mixture of both diurnal temperature variation and seasonal patterns of plants. Statistical analyses revealed that diurnal temperature variation instead of average temperature imposed a positive and considerable effect alone and also jointly with plants. Due to higher diurnal temperature variation with more climatic niches, microbial communities might evolutionarily adapt into more dispersed phylogenetic assembly based on the standardized effect size of MNTD metric, and ecologically form higher community resistance and resiliency with stronger network interactions among species. Archaea and the bacterial groups of Chloroflexi, Alphaproteobacteria, and Deltaproteobacteria were sensitive to diurnal temperature variation with greater turnover rates at higher latitudes, indicating that greater diurnal temperature fluctuation imposes stronger selective pressure on thermal specialists, because bacteria and archaea, single-celled organisms, have extreme short generation period compared to animal and plant. Our findings thus illustrate that the dynamics of microbial community and species interactions are crucial to assess ecosystem stability to climate variations in an increased climatic variability era.
Highlights
Climate change involves changes in the variability or average state of the atmosphere over time, which has profoundly disturbed and will continue to affect natural ecosystems and human life styles in the 21st century (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2014)
Our observations showed that seasonal turnover rates for most taxonomic groups, especially Archaea and the bacterial groups of Chloroflexi, Alphaproteobacteria, and Deltaproteobacteria, positively correlated with temperature variation (DTR and temperature range (TR)) (Figure 3), indicating they were more sensitive to high temperature variation in high latitude areas
The present study demonstrated that the seasonal turnover rhythm of microbial communities was spatially structured across the latitudinal gradient, which may be caused by a mixture of both diurnal temperature variation and seasonal patterns of plants
Summary
Climate change involves changes in the variability or average state of the atmosphere over time, which has profoundly disturbed and will continue to affect natural ecosystems and human life styles in the 21st century (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2014). Potential impacts of changes in average climatic conditions on the structure and temporal dynamics of biological communities have attracted attention worldwide (Woodward et al, 2010; Liang et al, 2015; Zhou et al, 2016), ecologists have only begun to understand the potential impacts of changes in climatic variability (Thompson et al, 2013; Vázquez et al, 2015; Chan et al, 2016; Wang and Soininen, 2017). Given the fundamental role in microbial communities in biogeochemical cycling, their responses to climate change may be important determinants of ecosystem response to global change (Singh et al, 2010; Barberan et al, 2012). Little is known whether the magnitude of climate variation selects for microorganisms, and how their community structure and seasonal dynamics vary with climate variation
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