Soil microbiotic homogenization occurred after long‐term agricultural development in desert areas across northern China

Abstract

Soil microbial communities respond significantly to long‐term agricultural development in desert areas. Because soil microbial communities are distinct in various deserts at different eco‐climate regions, their response patterns to agricultural development are diverse at a local scale. However, whether the different response patterns had some commonalities across various types of deserts at a larger spatial scale remained unclear. To address this question, historical soil samples, collected in different years from pairwise long‐term experimental plots (desert and farmland) at five field stations of the Chinese Ecosystem Research Network across northern China, were analyzed through high‐throughput sequencing approach. Here, we found that soil bacterial communities were sharply different between deserts and agricultural lands. Contrasting to desert soils with higher relative abundances of Actinobacteria and Firmicutes, agricultural soils harbored higher relative abundances of Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, and Planctomycetes and exhibited higher bacterial α‐diversity with less variation. More importantly, higher community similarities were found in agricultural lands for each station and all stations, suggesting that soil microbiotic homogenization occurred at both local and regional scales after long‐term agricultural development in desert areas. Further analyses revealed that the homogenization was due to the loss of desert‐endemic species and the range expansion of generalist species, which might result from the introduction of crops combined with agricultural practices. The soil microbiotic homogenization associated with the loss of endemic species should be paid special attention to because this might imply the decrease in ecological resilience to perturbations and might lead to rapid desertification in desert margin areas.

Construction Means of Soil Microbial Synusiologic Network Based on ANN

“…The purpose of the DM technique is to analyze the relationship between data from multiple dimensions, search for the message hidden in the data, provide decision support for scientific research, and promote the transformation of production and lifestyle. In order to understand the overall situation of soil pollution and remediation, study the mutual influence of various factors in the domain of soil remediation [ 4 ]. At the same time, synusiologic civilization construction and synusiologic environmental protection have entered a new era driven by data [ 5 ].…”

Linking soil bacterial diversity to satellite‐derived vegetation productivity: a case study in arid and semi‐arid desert areas

“…Simultaneously, archived soils have been suggested to be useful in providing microbial ecological information (Cary and Fierer, 2014; Dolfing and Feng, 2015). Using time‐series archived soils from LTFEs across China, our recent studies found that the distribution patterns of bacterial communities corresponded to ecogeographic regions (Liu et al ., 2019) and that bacterial communities were homogenized after agricultural development in desert areas (Liu et al ., 2020).…”