Deterministic processes dominate soil microbial community assembly in subalpine coniferous forests on the Loess Plateau

Microbial community assembly is influenced by a continuum (actually the trade-off) between deterministic and stochastic processes. An understanding of this ecological continuum is of great significance for drawing inferences about the effects of community assembly processes on microbial community st...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PeerJ (San Francisco, CA) CA), 2019-05, Vol.7, p.e6746, Article e6746
Main Authors: Zhao, Pengyu, Bao, Jiabing, Wang, Xue, Liu, Yi, Li, Cui, Chai, Baofeng
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Community assembly
Community structure
Coniferous forests
Correlation analysis
Deoxyribonucleic acid
DNA
Ecological process
Ecology
Forests
Genetic testing
Habitats
Laboratories
Microbiology
Microbiomes
Organic soils
Phylogenetic structure
Phylogenetics
Phylogeny
Soil carbon
Soil microbial community
Soil microbiology
Soil microorganisms
Stochastic models
Stochastic processes
Stochasticity
Structure-function relationships
Vegetation
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Summary:Microbial community assembly is influenced by a continuum (actually the trade-off) between deterministic and stochastic processes. An understanding of this ecological continuum is of great significance for drawing inferences about the effects of community assembly processes on microbial community structure and function. Here, we investigated the driving forces of soil microbial community assembly in three different environmental contexts located on subalpine coniferous forests of the Loess Plateau in Shanxi, China. The variation in null deviations and phylogenetic analysis showed that a continuum existed between deterministic and stochastic processes in shaping the microbial community structure, but deterministic processes prevailed. By integrating the results of redundancy analysis (RDA), multiple regression tree (MRT) analysis and correlation analysis, we found that soil organic carbon (SOC) was the main driver of the community structure and diversity patterns. In addition, we also found that SOC had a great influence on the community assembly processes. In conclusion, our results show that deterministic processes always dominated assembly processes in shaping bacterial community structure along the three habitat contexts.
ISSN:2167-8359
2167-8359
DOI:10.7717/peerj.6746