Temperature mediates microbial multitrophic communities assembly and soil-borne fungal pathogens in coastal ecosystems

Abstract

A better understanding of assembly processes of multitrophic microbial communities and soil-borne fungal pathogens is important to predict changes in ecosystem functions. However, the drivers governing the microbial community assembly processes and soil-borne fungal pathogen distributions, particularly in the coastal ecosystem is unclear. Here, we examined the shifts in soil bacterial, fungal, protistan communities and soil-borne fungal pathogens across 2000 km in the coastal areas of eastern Australia. Determinism predominated the multitrophic microbial community assembly with mean annual temperature (MAT) differentially mediates deterministic and stochastic processes. Contrasting to protistan community, bacterial and fungal community assembly tended to be more deterministic in higher MAT regions. A total of 609 soil-borne fungal pathogens were identified with the total relative abundances ranged from 0.34 % to 52.29 % in a given soil sample. The profile of soil-borne fungal pathogens was significantly correlated with bacterial and protistan communities. Random forest indicated that MAT was the main driver of soil-borne fungal pathogens. Altogether, our work provided evidence that MAT is a critical factor driving the belowground microbial community assembly and soil-borne fungal pathogen patterns and highlighted the potential importance of trophic interactions in predicting dynamics of soil-borne fungal pathogens under the changing environment.