Altitudinal Distribution Patterns of Soil Bacterial and Archaeal Communities Along Mt. Shegyla on the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

Unraveling the distribution patterns of plants and animals along the elevational gradients has been attracting growing scientific interests of ecologists, whether the microbial communities exhibit similar elevational patterns, however, remains largely less documented. Here, we investigate the biogeographic distribution of soil archaeal and bacterial communities across three vertical climate zones (3,106-4,479 m.a.s.l.) in Mt. Shegyla on the Tibetan Plateau, by combining quantitative PCR and high-throughput barcoded pyrosequencing approaches. Our results found that the ratio of bacterial to archaeal 16S rRNA gene abundance was negatively related with elevation. Acidobacteria dominated in the bacterial communities, Marine benthic group A dominated in the archaeal communities, and the relative abundance of both taxa changed significantly with elevation. At the taxonomic levels of domain, phylum, and class, more bacterial taxa than archaeal exhibited declining trend in diversity along the increasing elevational gradient, as revealed by Shannon and Faith's phylogenetic diversity indices. Unweighted UniFrac distance clustering showed that the bacterial communities from the mountainous temperate zone clustered together, whereas those from the subalpine cool temperate zone clustered together. However, the partitioning effect of elevational zones on the archaeal community was much weaker compared to that on bacteria. Redundancy analysis revealed that soil geochemical factors explained 58.3 % of the bacterial community variance and 75.4 % of the archaeal community variance. Taken together, we provide evidence that soil bacteria exhibited more apparent elevational zonation feature and decreased diversity pattern than archaea with increasing elevation, and distribution patterns of soil microbes are strongly regulated by soil properties along elevational gradient in this plateau montane ecosystem.

A hollow bacterial diversity pattern with elevation in Wolong Nature Reserve, Western Sichuan Plateau

“…Compared with previous studies which reported a monotonous decline, hump-backed, and no pattern in diversity on bacteria with increasing elevation (Bryant et al 2008;Zhang et al 2009;Singh et al 2012;Wang et al 2015), our results illustrated that the diversity pattern found in soil bacterial community is for a significant mid-elevation hollow. A hollow diversity pattern is rarely detected in nature (Rahbek 2005), and those various distribution patterns suggest that there may be some different factors could be responsible for diversity patterns.…”

“…Those studies all found no exact factor related with diversity pattern and the natural disturbance rates in soil (e.g., the high day-night temperature variation, UV exposure) is no obvious quantifiable disturbance factor available for Mount Nadu. Nevertheless, Wang et al (2015) found that the decline pattern of bacterial diversity on Mt. Shegyla was affected by soil pH and clay content definitely.…”

Diversity and distribution of autotrophic microbial community along environmental gradients in grassland soils on the Tibetan Plateau

“…It indicated that soil autotrophic microbial community structures were strongly regulated and driven by the variations of soil properties and climatic conditions resulting from elevation difference. This altitudinal distribution pattern was also exhibited in bacteria, archaea, ammonia oxidizers, and denitrifiers (Wang et al 2015;Yang et al 2014;Yuan et al 2014;Zheng et al 2014). VPA revealed a much lower individual explanation of each environmental factor to the community variation (≤10.3 %).…”

“…Climate warming has accelerated glacier melting (Ding et al 2006;Lutz et al 2014) and changed vegetation phenology (Jin et al 2013;Shen et al 2014) on the plateau. A few recent studies have revealed that soil bacteria, archaea, ammonia oxidizers, and denitrifiers were sensitive to environmental changes and exhibited clear elevational patterns (Wang et al 2015;Yang et al 2014;Yuan et al 2014;Zheng et al 2014). However, as a global biodiversity hotspot, Tibetan Plateau receives less attention in soil functional microbial communities and their response to environmental changes, especially in autotrophic microbial communities.…”

Environmental Filtering Process Has More Important Roles than Dispersal Limitation in Shaping Large-Scale Prokaryotic Beta Diversity Patterns of Grassland Soils

“…Prokaryotes (including bacteria and archaea) play important roles in the global nutrient cycling, ecosystem services, and environmental sustainability [32], and molecular investigations have revealed their widespread occurrence in terrestrial ecosystems [33][34][35][36][37][38]. A large body of studies showed that microbial communities differ substantially across ecosystem types [36], with environmental or spatial factors as the major determinants structuring microbial communities [29][30][31].…”