scholarly journals Biogeographical patterns and mechanisms of microbial community assembly that underlie successional biocrusts across northern China

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuanlong Li ◽  
Chunxiang Hu
Keyword(s):  
Community Assembly ◽  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Dispersal Limitation ◽  
Northern China ◽  
Species Sorting ◽  
Eukaryotic Community ◽  
Topological Features ◽  
Successional Stages ◽  
Microbial Community Assembly ◽  
Community Difference

AbstractBiocrusts play critical eco-functions in many drylands, however it is challenging to explore their community assembly, particularly within patched successional types and across climate zones. Here, different successional biocrusts (alga, lichen, and moss-dominated biocrusts) were collected across the northern China, and assembly of biocrust microbial communities was investigated by high-throughput sequencing combined with measurements of soil properties and microclimate environments. Bacterial and eukaryotic communities showed that the maximum and minimum community variation occurred across longitude and latitude, respectively. In the regions where all three stages of biocrusts were involved, the highest community difference existed between successional stages, and decreased with distance. The community assembly was generally driven by dispersal limitation, although neutral processes have controlled the eukaryotic community assembly in hyperarid areas. Along the succession, bacterial community had no obvious patterns, but eukaryotic community showed increasing homogeneity, with increased species sorting and decreased dispersal limitation for community assembly. Compared to early successional biocrusts, there were higher microbial mutual exclusions and more complex networks at later stages, with distinct topological features. Correlation analysis further indicated that the balance between deterministic and stochastic processes might be mediated by aridity, salinity, and total phosphorus, although the mediations were opposite for bacteria and eukaryotes.

scholarly journals Historical contingency impacts on community assembly and ecosystem function in chemosynthetic marine ecosystems

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitri Kalenitchenko ◽  
Erwan Peru ◽  
Pierre E. Galand
Keyword(s):  
Community Assembly ◽  
Sea Water ◽  
Marine Ecosystem ◽  
Marine Ecosystems ◽  
Metagenomic Sequencing ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Species Sorting ◽  
Environmental Selection ◽  
Microbial Community Assembly

AbstractPredicting ecosystem functioning requires an understanding of the mechanisms that drive microbial community assembly. Many studies have explored microbial diversity extensively and environmental factors are thought to be the principal drivers of community composition. Community assembly is, however, also influenced by past conditions that might affect present-day assemblages. Historical events, called legacy effects or historical contingencies, remain poorly studied in the sea and their impact on the functioning of the communities is not known. We tested the influence, if any, of historical contingencies on contemporary community assembly and functions in a marine ecosystem. To do so, we verified if different inoculum communities colonizing the same substrate led to communities with different compositions. We inoculated wood with sea water microbes from different marine environments that differ in ecological and evolutionary history. Using 16S rRNA and metagenomic sequencing, it was demonstrated that historical contingencies change the composition and potential metabolisms of contemporary communities. The effect of historical events was transient, dominated by environmental selection as, over time, species sorting was a more important driver of community assembly. Our study shows not only that historical contingencies affect marine ecosystems but takes the analysis a step further by characterizing this effect as strong but transient.

scholarly journals Ecosystem size-induced environmental fluctuations affect the temporal dynamics of community assembly mechanisms

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raven L Bier ◽  
Máté Vass ◽  
Anna J Székely ◽  
Silke Langenheder
Keyword(s):  
Community Assembly ◽  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Bacterial Community Composition ◽  
Dispersal Limitation ◽  
Priority Effects ◽  
Environmental Fluctuation ◽  
Species Sorting ◽  
Ecosystem Size ◽  
Environmental Fluctuations ◽  
Over Time

Understanding processes that determine community membership and abundance is important for many fields from theoretical community ecology to conservation. However, spatial community studies are often conducted only at a single timepoint despite the known influence of temporal variability on community assembly processes. Here we used a spatiotemporal study to determine how environmental fluctuation differences induced by mesocosm volumes (larger volumes were more stable) influence assembly processes of aquatic bacterial metacommunities along a press disturbance gradient. By combining path analysis and network approaches, we found mesocosm size categories had distinct relative influences of assembly process and environmental factors that determined spatiotemporal bacterial community composition, including dispersal and species sorting by conductivity. These processes depended on, but were not affected proportionately by, mesocosm size. Low fluctuation, large mesocosms primarily developed through the interplay of species sorting that became more important over time and transient priority effects as evidenced by more time-delayed associations. High fluctuation, small mesocosms had regular disruptions to species sorting and greater importance of ecological drift and dispersal limitation indicated by lower richness and higher taxa replacement. Together, these results emphasize that environmental fluctuations influence ecosystems over time and its impacts are modified by biotic properties intrinsic to ecosystem size.

scholarly journals Beneath the surface: community assembly and functions of the coral skeleton microbiome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Ricci ◽  
Vanessa Rossetto Marcelino ◽  
Linda Blackall ◽  
Michael Kühl ◽  
Monica Medina ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Microbial Community ◽  
Community Assembly ◽  
Dispersal Limitation ◽  
Coral Host ◽  
Chemical Gradients ◽  
Physico Chemical ◽  
Archaeal Species ◽  
Coral Holobiont ◽  
Coral Health ◽  
Microbial Community Assembly

Coral microbial ecology is a burgeoning field, driven by the urgency of understanding coral health and slowing reef loss due to climate change. Coral resilience depends on its microbiota, and both the tissue and the underlying skeleton are home to a rich biodiversity of eukaryotic, bacterial and archaeal species that form an integral part of the coral holobiont. New techniques now enable detailed studies of the endolithic habitat, and our knowledge of the skeletal microbial community and its eco-physiology is increasing rapidly, with multiple lines of evidence for the importance of the skeletal microbiota in coral health and functioning. Here, we review the roles these organisms play in the holobiont, including nutritional exchanges with the coral host and decalcification of the host skeleton. Microbial metabolism causes steep physico-chemical gradients in the skeleton, creating micro-niches that, along with dispersal limitation and priority affects, define the fine-scale microbial community assembly. Coral bleaching causes drastic changes in the skeletal microbiome, which can mitigate bleaching effects and promote coral survival during stress periods, but may also have detrimental effects. Finally, we discuss the idea that the skeleton may function as a microbial reservoir that can promote recolonization of the tissue microbiome following dysbiosis and help the coral holobiont return to homeostasis.

scholarly journals Linked networks reveal dual roles of insect dispersal and species sorting for bacterial communities in flowers

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ash T. Zemenick ◽  
Rachel L. Vannette ◽  
Jay A. Rosenheim
Keyword(s):  
Plant Species ◽  
Community Assembly ◽  
Bacterial Communities ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Dispersal Rate ◽  
Dual Roles ◽  
Species Sorting ◽  
Insect Dispersal ◽  
Microbial Community Assembly

AbstractDue to the difficulty of tracking microbial dispersal, it rarely possible to disentangle the relative importance of dispersal and species sorting for microbial community assembly. Here, we leverage a detailed multilevel network to examine drivers of bacterial community assembly within flowers. We show that plant species with similar visitor communities tend to have similar bacterial communities, and visitor identity to be more important than dispersal rate in structuring floral bacterial communities. However, plants occupied divergent positions in plant-insect and plant-microbe networks, suggesting an important role for species sorting. Taken together, our analyses suggest dispersal is important in determining similarity in microbial communities across plant species, but not as important in determining structural features of the floral bacterial network. A multilevel network approach thus allows us to address features of community assembly that cannot be considered when viewing networks as separate entities.

scholarly journals Phylogenetic turnover during subtropical forest succession across environmental and phylogenetic scales

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Purschke ◽  
Stefan G. Michalski ◽  
Helge Bruelheide ◽  
Walter Durka
Keyword(s):  
Community Structure ◽  
Community Assembly ◽  
Deterministic Model ◽  
Species Turnover ◽  
Subtropical Forest ◽  
List Type ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Patterns ◽  
Species Sorting ◽  
Phylogenetic Community Structure ◽  
Successional Stages

SummaryAlthough spatial and temporal patterns of phylogenetic community structure during succession are inherently interlinked and assembly processes vary with environmental and phylogenetic scale, successional studies of community assembly have yet to integrate spatial and temporal components of community structure, while accounting for scaling issues. To gain insight into the processes that generate biodiversity after disturbance, we combine analyses of spatial and temporal phylogenetic turnover across phylogenetic scales, accounting for covariation with environmental differences.We compared phylogenetic turnover, at the species-and individual-level, within and between five successional stages, representing woody plant communities in a subtropical forest chronosequence. We decomposed turnover at different phylogenetic depths and assessed its covariation with between-plot abiotic differences.Phylogenetic turnover between stages was low relative to species turnover and was not explained by abiotic differences. However, within the late successional stages, there was high presence/absence-based turnover (clustering) that occurred deep in the phylogeny and covaried with environmental differentiation.Our results support a deterministic model of community assembly where (i) phylogenetic composition is constrained through successional time, but (ii) towards late succession, species sorting into preferred habitats according to niche traits that are conserved deep in phylogeny, becomes increasingly important.

scholarly journals The limited spatial scale of dispersal in soil arthropods revealed with whole-community haplotype-level metabarcoding

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
P Arribas ◽  
C Andújar ◽  
A Salces-Castellano ◽  
BC Emerson ◽  
AP Vogler
Keyword(s):  
Community Assembly ◽  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Dispersal Limitation ◽  
Spatial Arrangement ◽  
Local Scale ◽  
Joint Analysis ◽  
Soil Arthropods ◽  
High Turnover ◽  
Soil Mesofauna ◽  
Local Distance

ABSTRACTSoil mesofauna communities are hyperdiverse and critical for ecosystem functioning. However, our knowledge on spatial structure and underlying processes of community assembly for soil arthropods is scarce, hampered by limited empirical data on species diversity and turnover. We implement a high-throughput-sequencing approach to generate comparative data for thousands of arthropods at three hierarchical levels: genetic, species and supra-specific lineages. A joint analysis of the spatial arrangement across these levels can reveal the predominant processes driving the variation in biological assemblages at the local scale. This multi-hierarchical approach was performed using haplotype-level-COI metabarcoding of entire communities of mites, springtails and beetles from three Iberian mountain regions. Tens of thousands of specimens were extracted from deep and superficial soil layers and produced comparative phylogeographic data for >1000 co-distributed species and nearly 3000 haplotypes. Local assemblages were highly distinctive between grasslands and forests, and within each of them showed strong spatial structures and high endemicity at the scale of a few kilometres or less. The local distance-decay patterns were self-similar for the haplotypes and higher hierarchical entities, and this fractal structure was very similar in all three regions, pointing to a significant role of dispersal limitation driving the local-scale community assembly. Our results from whole-community metabarcoding provide unprecedented insight into how dispersal limitations constrain mesofauna community structure within local spatial settings over evolutionary timescales. If generalized across wider areas, the high turnover and endemicity in the soil locally may indicate extremely high richness globally, challenging our current estimations of total arthropod-diversity on Earth.

scholarly journals Stochastic and deterministic drivers of seasonal variation of fungal community in tobacco field soil

PeerJ ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e6962
Author(s):  
Xing Li ◽  
Tianming Li ◽  
Delong Meng ◽  
Tianbo Liu ◽  
Yongjun Liu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Seasonal Variation ◽  
Fungal Community ◽  
Community Assembly ◽  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Null Model ◽  
Dispersal Limitation ◽  
Community Diversity ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Soil Fungal Community ◽  
Community Variation

Background The soil fungal community plays an important role in global carbon cycling and shows obvious seasonal variations, however, drivers, particularly stochastic drivers, of the seasonal variation in the fungal community have never been addressed in sufficient detail. Methods We investigated the soil fungal community variation between summer growing (SG) and winter fallow (WF) stage, through high throughput sequencing of internal transcribed spacer (ITS) amplicons. Subsequently, we assessed the contribution of different ecological processes to community assembly using null-model-based statistical framework. Results The results showed that the fungal community diversity decreased significantly after tobacco cropping in the SG stage and the composition showed a clear turnover between the WF and SG stages. The variation in community composition was largely attributable to the presence of a small portion of Dothideomycetes in the WF stage that dominated the soil fungal community in the SG stage. The organic matter, temperature, and water content were the main deterministic factors that regulated the fungal community; these factors explained 34.02% of the fungal community variation. Together with the result that the fungal community was mainly assembled by the dispersal process, our results suggested that the stochastic factors played important roles in driving the seasonal variation of fungal community. The dispersal limitation dominated the fungal community assembly during the WF stage when homogenizing dispersal was the main assembly process of the fungal community in the SG stage. Thus, we proposed that the dispersal processes are important drivers for seasonal variation of fungal community in tobacco planted soil.

scholarly journals Microbial phylogenetic relatedness links to distinct successional patterns of bacterial and fungal communities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiang Lin ◽  
Francisco Dini-Andreote ◽  
Travis B Meador ◽  
Roey Angel ◽  
Lenka Meszarosov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Microbial Community ◽  
Resource Availability ◽  
Community Assembly ◽  
Ecological Succession ◽  
Fungal Communities ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Soil Age ◽  
Successional Stages ◽  
Occurrence Patterns ◽  
Microbial Community Assembly

Development of soil microbial communities along ecological succession is crucial for ecosystem functioning and maintenance. However, ecological processes mediating microbial community assembly and microbial co-occurrence patterns along ecological succession remain unclear. Here, we explored community phylogenetic structures, ecological processes driving community phylogenetic turnover, and taxa co-occurrence patterns in bacterial and fungal communities across a well-established chronosequence of post-mining lands spanning 54 years of recovery. Meanwhile, by synthesizing prior studies of microbial phylogeny in community assembly, we proposed two conceptual models to better explain our results. At early successional stages, the significantly increasing phylogenetic clustering of bacterial communities with soil age was co-determined by the environmental selection from soil vegetation cover and by bacterial heterogeneous responses that less phylogenetically similar bacteria differently expanded their population in response to the increasing resource availability in soil along succession. At later successional stages, bacterial community phylogenetic structures displayed progressively lower variability. The fungal community phylogenetic structures varied relatively less and were independent of soil age, soil properties and vegetation cover, which was attributed to the dominance of stochastic processes in community structure turnover along succession. Network analysis revealed a decrease in bacterial co-occurrence complexity along succession, which aligned with a decrease in average pairwise phylogenetic distances between co-occurring bacteria. These patterns together implied a decrease in potential bacterial cooperation that was probably mediated by increasing resource availability along succession. The increased complexity of fungal co-occurrence along succession was independent of the phylogeny between co-occurring fungi. This study provides new sights into ecological processes and mechanisms underlying bacterial and fungal community dynamics along ecological succession, thereby boosting our understanding of the interactions between microbial community assembly and soil environment gradients.

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