Soil abiotic variables are more important than Salicaceae phylogeny or habitat specialization in determining soil microbial community structure

Abstract

Predicting the outcome of interspecific interactions is a central goal in ecology. The diverse soil microbes that interact with plants are shaped by different aspects of plant identity, such as phylogenetic history and functional group. Species interactions may also be strongly shaped by abiotic environment, but there is mixed evidence on the relative importance of environment, plant identity and their interactions in shaping soil microbial communities. Using a multifactor, split-plot field experiment, we tested how hydrologic context, and three facets of Salicaceae plant identity-habitat specialization, phylogenetic distance and species identity-influence soil microbial community structure. Analysis of microbial community sequencing data with generalized dissimilarity models showed that abiotic environment explained up to 25% of variation in community composition of soil bacteria, fungi and archaea, while Salicaceae identity influenced <1% of the variation in community composition of soil microbial taxa. Multivariate linear models indicated that the influence of Salicaceae identity was small, but did contribute to differentiation of soil microbes within treatments. Moreover, results from a microbial niche breadth analysis show that soil microbes in wetlands have more specialized host associations than soil microbes in drier environments-showing that abiotic environment changed how plant identity correlated with soil microbial communities. This study demonstrates the predominance of major abiotic factors in shaping soil microbial community structure; the significance of abiotic context to biotic influence on soil microbes; and the utility of field experiments to disentangling the abiotic and biotic factors that are thought to be most essential for soil microbial communities.

Late Quaternary climate change explains soil fungal community composition rather than fungal richness in forest ecosystems

“…However, total and functional group fungal richness were affected by some different contemporary environmental factors in temperate and tropic-subtropical forests, as reported in Tedersoo et al (2014). It is highly possible that plants can modify soil environments through litter or root exudates and soil environments can affect plants in ways resulting in plant-soil feedback that can influence total and saprotrophic fungal richness in tropic-subtropical forest (Erlandson, Wei, Savage, Cavender-Bares, & Peay, 2018). It is highly possible that plants can modify soil environments through litter or root exudates and soil environments can affect plants in ways resulting in plant-soil feedback that can influence total and saprotrophic fungal richness in tropic-subtropical forest (Erlandson, Wei, Savage, Cavender-Bares, & Peay, 2018).…”

Adaptive phenotypic divergence in an annual grass differs across biotic contexts*

“…; Erlandson et al. ), which vary across our populations (Fig. and Table ) and can also be altered by plant genotypes (Palomares‐Rius et al.…”

“…Several phenomena could explain this interactive effect of plant genotype and rhizosphere biota. Community composition of rhizosphere biota often differs strongly across abiotic source conditions (Bongers and Ferris 1999;Bulgarelli et al 2012;Erlandson et al 2018), which vary across our populations ( Fig. S2 and Table S1) and can also be altered by plant genotypes (Palomares-Rius et al 2012;Peiffer et al 2013;Lebeis et al 2015;Walters et al 2018), leading to genotype-by-source-environment dependent community composition.…”

Editorial 2019

“…The second section featured a number of manuscripts that investigated the structure of the microbiome in an attempt to understand the drivers of microbiota community assembly and turnover. Some contributions weighed in on the role of host phylogeny vs. ecology (Erlandson, Savage, Wei, Cavender‐Bares, & Peay, ; Ivens, Gadau, Kiers, & Kronauer, 2018; Hernandez‐Gomez, Briggler, & Williams, ; Kohl, Dearing, & Bordenstein, ; Nishida & Ochman, ; Roth‐Schulze et al., ; Schuelke, Pereira, Hardy, & Bik, ), others probed how the presence of hosts themselves alters the microbiota around them (Chen & Parfrey, ; Shukla, Vogel, Heckel, Vilcinskas, & Kaltenpoth, ), one investigated patterns of co‐infection (Rock et al, ) and one documented changes in microbiota during development (Prest, Kimball, Kueneman, & McKenzie, ). A few studies in this section studied the structure of the microbiome with manipulative experiments (e.g., Chen & Parfrey, ; Erlandson et al, ; Morella, Gomez, Wang, Leung, & Koskella, ; Raymann, Bobay, & Moran, ).…”