Abstract
Soil microbial communities play a key role in ecosystem functioning but still little is known about the processes that determine their turnover (β‐diversity) along ecological gradients. Here, we characterize soil microbial β‐diversity at two spatial scales and at multiple phylogenetic grains to ask how archaeal, bacterial and fungal communities are shaped by abiotic processes and biotic interactions with plants. We characterized microbial and plant communities using DNA metabarcoding of soil samples distributed across and within eighteen plots along an elevation gradient in the French Alps. The recovered taxa were placed onto phylogenies to estimate microbial and plant β‐diversity at different phylogenetic grains (i.e. resolution). We then modeled microbial β‐diversities with respect to plant β‐diversities and environmental dissimilarities across plots (landscape scale) and with respect to plant β‐diversities and spatial distances within plots (plot scale). At the landscape scale, fungal and archaeal β‐diversities were mostly related to plant β‐diversity, while bacterial β‐diversities were mostly related to environmental dissimilarities. At the plot scale, we detected a modest covariation of bacterial and fungal β‐diversities with plant β‐diversity; as well as a distance–decay relationship that suggested the influence of ecological drift on microbial communities. In addition, the covariation between fungal and plant β‐diversity at the plot scale was highest at fine or intermediate phylogenetic grains hinting that biotic interactions between those clades depends on early‐evolved traits.Altogether, we show how multiple ecological processes determine soil microbial community assembly at different spatial scales and how the strength of these processes change among microbial clades. In addition, we emphasized the imprint of microbial and plant evolutionary history on today's microbial community structure.
Highlights
It is well-accepted that soil microbial communities play a pivotal role in the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems (Eisenhauer et al 2013, Bradford et al 2017), in particular through their interactions with plant communities and their influence on nutrient cycling (Bardgett et al 2008, Van Der Heijden et al 2008)
We found that spatial distances moderately explained fungal β-diversity and weakly explained bacterial and archaeal β-diversity (H3, maximum mR2 value: 0.0703 [0.0658–0.0732] bacteria; 0.04671 [0.0426–0.0472], archaea)
The strong environmental variation along the elevation gradient was expected to exercise a substantial and direct filtering on microbial communities, vegetation was an essential factor co-varying with microbial community structure
Summary
It is well-accepted that soil microbial communities play a pivotal role in the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems (Eisenhauer et al 2013, Bradford et al 2017), in particular through their interactions with plant communities and their influence on nutrient cycling (Bardgett et al 2008, Van Der Heijden et al 2008). The linkage between plant and microbial β-diversities appears modest in many studies (Barberán et al 2015, Bahram et al 2016, Zinger et al 2017) These inconsistencies emphasize that despite considerable advances, there is still no general synthesis on how microbial communities change across space and whether spatial turnover is predictable from basic principles (Keddy 1992, Nemergut et al 2013). We argue that this gap in knowledge can be addressed through the study of microbial communities across multiple spatial scales and across multiple phylogenetic scales
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