Abstract
Soil bacteria are largely missing from future biodiversity assessments hindering comprehensive forecasts of ecosystem changes. Soil bacterial communities are expected to be more strongly driven by pH and less by other edaphic and climatic factors. Thus, alkalinisation or acidification along with climate change may influence soil bacteria, with subsequent influences for example on nutrient cycling and vegetation. Future forecasts of soil bacteria are therefore needed. We applied species distribution modelling (SDM) to quantify the roles of environmental factors in governing spatial abundance distribution of soil bacterial OTUs and to predict how future changes in these factors may change bacterial communities in a temperate mountain area. Models indicated that factors related to soil (especially pH), climate and/or topography explain and predict part of the abundance distribution of most OTUs. This supports the expectations that microorganisms have specific environmental requirements (i.e., niches/envelopes) and that they should accordingly respond to environmental changes. Our predictions indicate a stronger role of pH over other predictors (e.g. climate) in governing distributions of bacteria, yet the predicted future changes in bacteria communities are smaller than their current variation across space. The extent of bacterial community change predictions varies as a function of elevation, but in general, deviations from neutral soil pH are expected to decrease abundances and diversity of bacteria. Our findings highlight the need to account for edaphic changes, along with climate changes, in future forecasts of soil bacteria.
Highlights
Soil bacteria form a large part of Earth’s biota and biodiversity [1, 2] and they have an integral part in ecosystem functioning [3, 4]
16,167, 7836 and 5258 de novo (DN) Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and 376 CR genera were available for the modelling
The large differences in median corexpl and corpred of the gradient boosting model (GBM) (~0.97 and ~0.21, respectively) and GAMp (~0.97 and ~ −0.01) indicate overfitting, with GAMp failing to predict the abundances of most OTUs
Summary
Soil bacteria form a large part of Earth’s biota and biodiversity [1, 2] and they have an integral part in ecosystem functioning [3, 4]. It would be important to have forecasts of the future of soil bacteria upon changing environmental conditions [6,7,8,9]. They are still largely missing from future biodiversity assessments both at global (e.g., [10]) and regional levels (e.g., mountain ecosystems [11]). The effects of environmental changes on local edaphic conditions are, uncertain, and might result in increases or decreases of soil pH and organic C [16, 17]. Analogous to climate change [18], soil change scenarios would have to be developed that can build the foundation of future forecasts of soil bacterial communities [5, 19]
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