Abstract
Understanding the microbial community assembly is an essential topic in microbial ecology. Coastal wetlands are an important blue carbon sink, where microbes play a key role in biogeochemical cycling of nutrients and energy transformation. However, the drivers controlling the distribution patterns and assembly of bacterial and archaeal communities in coastal wetland are unclear. Here we examined the diversity, co-occurrence network, assembly processes and environmental drivers of bacterial and archaeal communities from inshore to offshore sediments by the sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons. The value of α- and β-diversity of bacterial and archaeal communities generally did not change significantly (P> 0.05) between offshore sites, but changed significantly (P< 0.05) among inshore sites. Sediment pH and salinity showed significant effects on the diversity and keystone taxa of bacterial and archaeal communities. The bacterial and archaeal co-occurrence networks were inextricably linked with pH and salinity to formed the large network nodes, suggesting that they were the key factors to drive the prokaryotic community. We also identified that heterogeneous and homogeneous selection drove the bacterial and archaeal community assembly, while the two selections became weaker from offshore sites to inshore sites, suggesting that deterministic processes were more important in offshore sites. Overall, these results suggested that the environmental filtering of pH and salinity jointly governed the assembly of prokaryotic community in offshore sediments. This study advances our understanding of microbial community assembly in coastal wetland ecosystems.
Highlights
Microbes are an essential component of ecosystems and drive a variety of elements cycles and substances transformation in natural ecosystems, including carbon mineralization, nitrogen sequestration and phosphorus release (Leff et al, 2015; Fierer, 2017; Wei et al, 2020; Yu et al, 2020, 2021a)
Our results showed that environmental filtering of pH and salinity jointly drove the prokaryotic community assembly, which largely expanded our understanding of the role of environmental drivers on the assembly of prokaryotic communities in coastal ecosystems
We found that sediment pH and salinity could affect the diversity, structure, co-occurrence network and keystone taxa of bacterial and archaeal communities, suggesting that pH and salinity were key factors driving the prokaryotic community assembly
Summary
Microbes are an essential component of ecosystems and drive a variety of elements cycles and substances transformation in natural ecosystems, including carbon mineralization, nitrogen sequestration and phosphorus release (Leff et al, 2015; Fierer, 2017; Wei et al, 2020; Yu et al, 2020, 2021a). Coastal ecosystems store large amounts of blue carbon due to their high primary. Coastal ecosystems exhibit special environmental conditions such as high salinity, aerobic-anaerobic exchange, and rich organic matter, supporting that various unique microbes for biogeochemical cycling of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur Previous studies indicated that the diversity, assembly and functional traits of microbial communities varied across coastal ecosystems (Lauber et al, 2009; Rousk et al, 2010; Rath and Rousk, 2015; Ma et al, 2017; Zhong et al, 2017; Yu et al, 2020). Much less is known about the drivers of microbial community assembly in coastal ecosystems
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