Differentiation strategies of soil rare and abundant microbial taxa in response to changing climatic regimes

Abstract

Summary Despite the important roles of soil microbes, especially the most diverse rare taxa in maintaining community diversity and multifunctionality, how different climate regimes alter the stability and functions of the rare microbial biosphere remains unknown. We reciprocally transplanted field soils across a latitudinal gradient to simulate climate change and sampled the soils annually after harvesting the maize over the following 6 years (from 2005 to 2011). By sequencing microbial 16S ribosomal RNA gene amplicons, we found that changing climate regimes significantly altered the composition and dynamics of soil microbial communities. A continuous succession of the rare and abundant communities was observed. Rare microbial communities were more stable under changing climatic regimes, with lower variations in temporal dynamics, and higher stability and constancy of diversity. More nitrogen cycling genes were detected in the rare members than in the abundant members, including amoA, napA, nifH, nirK, nirS, norB and nrfA. Random forest analysis and receiver operating characteristics analysis showed that rare taxa may act as potential contributors to maize yield under changing climatics. The study indicates that the taxonomically and functionally diverse rare biosphere has the potential to increase functional redundancy and enhance the ability of soil communities to counteract environmental disturbances. With ongoing global climate change, exploring the succession process and functional changes of rare taxa may be important in elucidating the ecosystem stability and multifunctionality that are mediated by microbial communities.

Impact of Rocky Desertification Control on Soil Bacterial Community in Karst Graben Basin, Southwestern China

“…Therefore, the three top OTUs in our study will be critical drivers, or indicators, of key soil biogeochemical processes. Though rare soil bacteria are also the drivers of key functions in terrestrial ecosystems, which may be due to effects that are disproportionately large given their abundance or via the provision of insurance effects (Jousset et al, 2017), their roles in biogeochemical cycles is far less clear (Liang et al, 2020). Thus, it is critical that future research describes the contribution of rare soil bacteria driving ecosystem multifunctionality.…”

“…Microorganisms are important components of soils (Beveridge, 1989), which play major roles in maintaining biogeochemical cycling, complexity and stability of belowground ecosystems (Delgado-Baquerizo et al, 2018Wagg et al, 2019). Predictive understanding of soil bacterial communities is very important to forecast the ecological consequences caused by environmental changes (Delgado-Baquerizo et al, 2018;Liang et al, 2020). Besides, the advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies provide a rapid and low-cost tool to understand microbial ecology, such as microbial community structures, diversities, interactions and co-occurrence patterns (Loman et al, 2012;Ma et al, 2016;Xue et al, 2017Xue et al, , 2020Schmidt et al, 2019;Wagg et al, 2019).…”

Stronger Environmental Adaption of Abundant than Rare Microbes in Wetland Soils from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

“…This can lead to a skewed abundance distribution in a local microbial community, with relatively few dominant and a large number of rare species (alternatively known as a "rare biosphere") [17,19,20]. Previous studies have reported that rare and abundant species often show different distribution patterns and functional traits [21][22][23]. Therefore, disentangling the biogeography and community assembly of rare and abundant microbial taxa is essential for understanding microbedriven ecosystem processes and functions.…”

“…For instance, local physicochemical properties have greater effects on both rare and abundant bacterial β-diversity compared to geospatial factors [20]. However, most studies investigate the biogeography of rare and abundant bacterial communities in agricultural soils [17,22,24,25], and little is known about rare and abundant bacterial and fungal taxa in natural wetlands.…”

“…The relative abundance of a rare or abundant taxon is the result of a tradeoff between its growth and death rates [29]. Rare and abundant microbial taxa show diverse responses to environmental change [22,25]. Environmental thresholds of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in European grassland are estimated using the accumulated values of change points of all the species in a given microbial community [30].…”