Abstract
Both fungal and bacterial communities in soils play key roles in driving forest ecosystem processes across multiple time scales, but how seasonal changes in environmental factors shape these microbial communities is not well understood. Here, we aimed to evaluate the importance of seasons, elevation, and soil depth in determining soil fungal and bacterial communities, given the influence of climate conditions, soil properties and plant traits. In this study, seasonal patterns of diversity and abundance did not synchronize between fungi and bacteria, where soil fertility explained the diversity and abundance of soil fungi but soil water content explained those of soil bacteria. Model-based clustering showed that seasonal changes in both abundant and rare taxonomic groups were different between soil fungi and bacteria. The cluster represented by ectomycorrhizal genus Lactarius was a dominant group across soil fungal communities and fluctuated seasonally. For soil bacteria, the clusters composed of dominant genera were seasonally stable but varied greatly depending on elevation and soil depth. Seasonally changing clusters of soil bacteria (e.g., Nitrospira and Pelosinus) were not dominant groups and were related to plant phenology. These findings suggest that the contribution of seasonal changes in climate conditions, soil fertility, and plant phenology to microbial communities might be equal to or greater than the effects of spatial heterogeneity of those factors. Our study identifies aboveground–belowground components as key factors explaining how microbial communities change during a year in forest soils at mid-to-high latitudes.
Highlights
Learning about the temporal patterns and processes of microbial communities can help us understand the drivers of community stability and ecosystem functioning (Shade et al, 2012)
We addressed the following three questions: (i) How do the soil fungal and bacterial communities change with seasons? (ii) How significant are these changes relative to those of elevation and soil depth? (iii) How are seasonal dynamics in soil fungal and bacterial communities affected by climate conditions, soil fertility, and plant phenology?
For the amplicon sequencing of soil bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) sequences, we detected a total of 8074 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) with 797 genera of bacteria
Summary
Learning about the temporal patterns and processes of microbial communities can help us understand the drivers of community stability and ecosystem functioning (Shade et al, 2012). The temporal dynamics of microbial communities has been observed across different time scales: rapid responses associated with dissolved organic matter within minutes (Fenchel, 2002), seasonal periodicity (Gilbert et al, 2012), and succession over several years or decades relating to growth and development of host organisms (Koenig et al, 2011; Clemmensen et al, 2015). Because soil microbial communities play a major role in regulating climate feedbacks to the C cycle (Bardgett et al, 2008), predicting the impacts of seasonal changes in climate conditions on the diversity and composition of soil microbes should be a high priority for management of these forested areas (Allison and Treseder, 2008). How periodic seasonal changes in environmental factors shape soil microbial communities remains poorly understood in forest ecosystems at mid-to-high latitudes
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