Distribution patterns of soil bacteria, fungi, and protists emerge from distinct assembly processes across subcommunities

Abstract

Environmental change exerts a profound effect on soil microbial domains—including bacteria, fungi, and protists—that each perform vital ecological processes. While these microbial domains are ubiquitous and extremely diverse, little is known about how they respond to environmental changes in urban soil ecosystems and what ecological processes shape them. Here we investigated the community assembly processes governing bacteria, fungi, and protists through the lens of four distinct subcommunities: abundant, conditionally rare, conditionally abundant, and rare taxa. We show that transient taxa, including the conditionally rare and conditionally rare or abundant taxa, were the predominant subcommunities. Deterministic processes (e.g., environmental filtering) had major roles in structuring all subcommunities of fungi, as well as conditionally rare and abundant protists. Stochastic processes had strong effects in structuring all subcommunities of bacteria (except rare taxa) and conditionally rare protists. Overall, our study underscores the importance of complementing the traditional taxonomy of microbial domains with the subcommunity approach when investigating microbial communities in urban soil ecosystems.