Abstract
Despite increasing investigations having studied the changing patterns of soil microbial communities along forest plantation development age sequences, the underlying phylogenetic assemblages are seldom studied for microbial community. Here, the soil bacterial taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity as well as the phylogenetic structure were examined to elucidate the community diversity and assembly in three typical ages (young, middle and mature) of Cunninghamia lanceolata plantations, a dominant economic tree species in southern China. Results indicated that the soil bacterial phylogenetic not taxonomic diversity increased with the increasing in stand age. The bacterial community composition differed significantly among the young, middle and mature plantations. Phylogenetic signals showed that bacterial communities were phylogenetically clustered and structured by environmental filtering in all studied plantations. In mature plantation, the effect of environmental filtering becomes stronger and bacteria taxa tend to intraspecific interact more complexly as characterized by co-occurrence network analysis. This suggests that ecological niche-based environmental filtering could be a dominant assembly process that structured the soil bacterial community along age sequences of Cunninghamia lanceolata plantations.
Highlights
Forest plantations have long been recognized by their contribution to humankind needs, such as industrial wood and local economy development [1]
The soil bacterial taxonomic and phylogenetic community composition can be separated into different clusters based on stand age according to the nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analyses (Figure 1c,d)
The bacterial community composition significantly differed both taxonomically and phylogenetically among different plantations based on the PerMANOVA results (Table S3)
Summary
Forest plantations have long been recognized by their contribution to humankind needs, such as industrial wood and local economy development [1]. Studies have demonstrated that forest age could significantly impact the soil microbial diversity and community composition [7,8]. Barber et al [9] revealed that older lands harbored distinct bacterial communities from young lands, with greater abundance of Acidobacteria in older plantation. Another recent investigation reported that the abundances of Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria enhanced with increase in forest age, while Acidobacteria was largely unchanged [10]. The changing pattern of soil bacterial community composition among different development stand age sequences has been reported, few studies have examined the mechanistic resolution and ecological processes structuring bacterial communities of different plantations
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