Soil phosphorus determines the distinct assembly strategies for abundant and rare bacterial communities during successional reforestation

Abstract

Uncovering the mechanisms underlying the diversity patterns of abundant and rare species is crucial for terrestrial biodiversity maintenance. However, the response of abundant and rare community assembly to ecological succession has not been explored, particularly considering soil profiles. Here 300 soil samples were collected from reforestation ecosystems from depths of up to 300 cm and horizontal distances of 30-90 cm from a tree. We revealed that soil phosphorus not only affected alpha diversity and community structure, but also mediated the balance of stochastic and deterministic processes for abundant and rare sub-communities, which exhibited contrasting assembly strategies. The abundant sub-community changed from variable selection to stochasticity with the increase of phosphorus, while the rare sub-community shifted from homogeneous selection to stochasticity. Dispersal limitation was the main assembly process in the abundant sub-community, while the rare sub-community was governed primarily by homogeneous selection. Moreover, the relative influence of deterministic processes increased with succession for both sub-communities. At the scale of a single tree, stochastic processes increased with soil depth in rare sub-community, while deterministic processes increased with the radius from a single tree in the abundant subcommunity. Overall, our results highlight the importance of the soil phosphorus-driven assembly process in understanding the re-assembly and maintenance of soil bacterial diversity.

Biogeography and assembly processes of abundant and rare soil microbial taxa in the southern part of the Qilian Mountain National Park, China

“…role in the abundant sub-communities and drift plays a more important role in the rare sub-communities). This result is consistent with the findings of previous studies in the northwestern Pacific Ocean (Wu, Logares, et al, 2017) and during successional reforestation (Peng et al, 2021). These results may be explained by the hypothesis proposed by Pandit et al (2009) that taxa with a wide niche breadth may be primarily affected by dispersal limitation (Pandit et al, 2009).…”

Aridity Threshold Induces Abrupt Change of Soil Abundant and Rare Bacterial Biogeography in Dryland Ecosystems

“…Furthermore, the higher diversity of rare taxa also means a more stochastic assembly process ( 65 ). When spatial isolation or temporal succession is strong enough, greater environmental heterogeneity enhances the relative influence of deterministic processes on community assembly ( 22 , 66 ).…”

Distinct strategies of the habitat generalists and specialists in sediment of Tibetan lakes

“…Stochastic processes, in contrast, include dispersal limitation and random changes (e.g. birth, death and ecological drift) (Peng et al ., 2021). Previous research has reported that the assembly of habitat generalists in plateau lakes are driven by stochastic processes, while deterministic processes govern community assembly of the habitat specialists (Liao et al ., 2016).…”