Climate change and human activities altered the diversity and composition of soil microbial community in alpine grasslands of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

Alpine ecosystems are known to be sensitive to climate change and human disturbances. However, the knowledge about the changes of their underground microbial communities is inadequate. We explored the diversity and structure of soil bacterial and fungal communities using Ilumina MiSeq sequencing in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Science of the total environment 2016-08, Vol.562, p.353-363
Main Authors: Zhang, Yong, Dong, Shikui, Gao, Qingzhu, Liu, Shiliang, Zhou, Huakun, Ganjurjav, Hasbagan, Wang, Xuexia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bacteria
Biodiversity
Climate Change
Environmental Monitoring
Fungi
Grass cultivation
Grassland
Overgrazing
Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau
Soil - chemistry
Soil Microbiology
Tibet
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Summary:Alpine ecosystems are known to be sensitive to climate change and human disturbances. However, the knowledge about the changes of their underground microbial communities is inadequate. We explored the diversity and structure of soil bacterial and fungal communities using Ilumina MiSeq sequencing in native alpine grasslands (i.e. the alpine meadow, alpine steppe) and cultivated grassland of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) under three-year treatments of overgrazing, warming and enhanced rainfall. Enhanced rainfall rather than warming significantly reduced soil microbial diversity in native alpine grasslands. Variable warming significantly reduced it in the cultivated grassland. Over 20% and 40% variations of microbial diversity could be explained by soil nutrients and moisture in the alpine meadow and cultivated grassland, separately. Soil microbial communities could be clustered into different groups according to different treatments in the alpine meadow and cultivated grassland. For the alpine steppe, with the lowest soil nutrients and moistures,
ISSN:0048-9697
1879-1026
DOI:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.03.221