Spatial and temporal turnover of soil microbial communities is not linked to function in a primary tropical forest

Abstract

The spatial and temporal linkages between turnover of soil microbial communities and their associated functions remain largely unexplored in terrestrial ecosystems. Yet defining these relationships and how they vary across ecosystems and microbial lineages is key to incorporating microbial communities into ecological forecasts and ecosystem models. To define linkages between turnover of soil bacterial and fungal communities and their function we sampled fungal and bacterial composition, abundance, and enzyme activities across a 3‐ha area of wet tropical primary forest over 2 yr. We show that fungal and bacterial communities both exhibited temporal turnover, but turnover of both groups was much lower than in temperate ecosystems. Turnover over time was driven by gain and loss of microbial taxa and not changes in abundance of individual species present in multiple samples. Only fungi varied over space with idiosyncratic variation that did not increase linearly with distance among sampling locations. Only phosphorus‐acquiring enzyme activities were linked to shifts in septate, decomposer fungal abundance; no enzymes were affected by composition or diversity of fungi or bacteria. Although temporal and spatial variation in composition was appreciable, because turnover of microbial communities did not alter the functional repertoire of decomposing enzymes, functional redundancy among taxa may be high in this ecosystem. Slow temporal turnover of tropical soil microbial communities and large functional redundancy suggests that shifts in abundance of particular functional groups may capture ecosystem function more accurately than composition in these heterogeneous ecosystems.

Legacy Effects Overshadow Tree Diversity Effects on Soil Fungal Communities in Oil Palm-Enrichment Plantations

“…Long-lasting DNA fragments from a dead, inactive fungal community may have been present in the soil. However, it is unlikely that they masked fungal turnover because numerous previous studies detected alterations in fungal community compositions, for example, in response to trenching, seasonal variation, and temporal turnover within time periods of 12-24 months [74][75][76].…”

Long‐ and short‐read metabarcoding technologies reveal similar spatiotemporal structures in fungal communities

“…ratio of a spatial distance to a time delay which results in equivalent community dissimilarity) of 5.4 and 3.3 month/ year for the total recovered fungal community and ECM community, respectively. In a recent study, Kivlin and Hawkes (2020) reported a space-for-time substitution rate of 81 month/year (reported as 6.8 day/1.5 m) in the soil fungal community of a nonseasonal tropical forest in Costa Rica. However, comparison is obscured by different spatial and temporal sampling scales between the two studies.…”

The Abundance of the nifH Gene Became Higher and the nifH-Containing Diazotrophic Bacterial Communities Changed During Primary Succession in the Hailuogou Glacier Chronosequence, China

“…The discrepancy between the succession of bacterial communities and of phoD and the diazotrophic communities might have been due to functional redundancy: functional traits may be shared between different species ( Louca et al, 2018 ). Due to functional redundancy, changes in the abundance of functional groups were proposed to capture the ecosystem function in heterogeneous ecosystems more accurately than changes in overall community composition ( Kivlin and Hawkes, 2020 ). In agreement, the abundance of nifH correlated with soil N content, whereas no trend was apparent in the succession of the diazotrophic community composition.…”