Environmental selection and dispersal limitation drive the assemblage of bacterial community in temperate forest soils

Abstract

Environmental selection and dispersal limitation are two basic processes underlying community assembly. The relative importance of those two processes differs across scales, community identities, and community types. The processes responsible for structuring microbial communities in soil of temperate subalpine forest are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the relationship between soil bacterial community structure and environmental factors, and quantified the relative role of edaphic factors, vegetation, and spatial variables in shaping the structure of six soil bacterial communities (LpMC1, LpMC2, PwMC, PmMC, PtMC, and BMC) in five forest types including Larix principis-rupprechtii, Picea wilsonii, Picea meyeri, Pinus tabulaeformis, and Betula platyphylla in Pangquangou Nature Reserve by using PCR-DGGE technology. Our results showed that the structure and biodiversity of bacterial communities were significantly different among six communities. The biodiversity of bacterial community were higher in LpMC2 and PtMC, lowest in PmMC, and highest in LpMC1. Soil environmental factors, such as pH, soil water content, total carbon, total nitrogen, soil organic matter, available phosphorous, and soil enzymes, were significantly correlated with biodiversity and structure of soil bacterial community. The beta diversity of bacterial communities were significantly correlated with geographic distance, indicating the influence of dispersal limitation on the structure of bacterial community. The order of driving force on the structure of bacterial community was edaphic factors (0.27), spatial factor (0.19) and vegetation (0.15) in six samples. Using regional soil microbes from 10 samples around reserve as source community, results from the microcosm experiments showed that the edaphic factors were the predominant driving factors (0.35) on structure of artificial dispersal bacterial community, while the high diversity of source microbial community affected the structure of microcosm soil. In summary, at local scale, environmental selection predominantly determined the structural and biodiversity of soil bacterial communities in temperate subalpine forest, while dispersal limitation played a significant role. Such a result indicated that deterministic processes and stochastic processes played important roles in shaping the structure of soil bacterial community at local scale, with the former having the leading role. The composition of dispersal soil bacteria community was source-dependent but also modulated by local environmental selection.