Temperature and Precipitation Drive Elevational Patterns of Microbial Beta Diversity in Alpine Grasslands

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms underlying biodiversity patterns is a central issue in ecology, while how temperature and precipitation jointly control the elevational patterns of microbes is understudied. Here, we studied the effects of temperature, precipitation and their interactions on the alpha and beta diversity of soil archaea and bacteria in alpine grasslands along an elevational gradient of 4,300-5,200 m on the Tibetan Plateau. Alpha diversity was examined on the basis of species richness and evenness, and beta diversity was quanti ed with the recently developed metric of local contributions to beta diversity (LCBD).Typical alpine steppe and meadow ecosystems were distributed below and above 4,850 m, respectively, which was consistent with the two main constraints of mean annual temperature (MAT) and mean annual precipitation (MAP). Species richness and evenness showed decreasing elevational patterns in archaea and nonsigni cant or U-shaped patterns in bacteria. The LCBD of both groups exhibited signi cant U-shaped elevational patterns, with the lowest values occurring at 4,800 m. For the three diversity metrics, soil pH was the primary explanatory variable in archaea, explaining over 20.1% of the observed variation, whereas vegetation richness, total nitrogen and the K/Al ratio presented the strongest effects on bacteria, with relative importance values of 16.1%, 12.5% and 11.6%, respectively. For the microbial community composition of both archaea and bacteria, the moisture index showed the dominant effect, explaining 17.6% of the observed variation, followed by MAT and MAP. Taken together, temperature and precipitation exerted considerable indirect effects on microbial richness and evenness through local environmental and energy supply-related variables, such as vegetation richness, whereas temperature exerted a larger direct in uence on LCBD and the community composition. Our ndings highlighted the profound in uence of temperature and precipitation interactions on microbial beta diversity in alpine grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau.

Organic fertilizer and hydrothermal conditions change the distribution of Medicago sativa L. productivity and soil bacterial diversity in coastal saline soil

“…Environmental factors profoundly contribute to shaping the soil microbiome, both spatially and temporally [5]. Precipitation, temperature, and their interaction are considered to be important factors affecting grassland microbial diversity [54], and these results were confirmed in the present research (Fig. 7).…”

The spatiotemporal variations of microbial community in relation to water quality in a tropical drinking water reservoir, southmost China

“…There was a similar nding in other studies (e.g., Liu et al, 2013;Najjar et al, 2020;Jiang et al, 2021). This may be due to the large difference in water temperature between seasons (Yang et al, 2022). The study of Ruhl et al (2022) also indicated that temperature is a major factor limiting the taxonomic and functional diversity of microbial communities.…”

The spatiotemporal variations of microbial community in relation to water quality in a tropical drinking water reservoir, Southmost China

“…There was a similar finding in other studies (e.g., Liu et al, 2013 ; El Najjar et al, 2020 ; Jiang et al, 2021 ). This may be due to the large difference in water temperature between seasons (Yang et al, 2022 ). In this study, the RDA result indicated that the temperature was the main driving factor for microbial community composition ( Supplementary Table S2 ), and the mantel's test also proved that the temperature was significantly correlated with bacteria and archaea ( Figure 8 ).…”