Contrasting assembly mechanisms and drivers of soil rare and abundant bacterial communities in 22-year continuous and non-continuous cropping systems

Abstract

Despite many studies on the influence of cropping practices on soil microbial community structure, little is known about ecological patterns of rare and abundant microbial communities in response to different tobacco cropping systems. Here, using the high-throughput sequencing technique, we investigated the impacts of two different cropping systems on soil biochemical properties and the microbial community composition of abundant and rare taxa and its driving factors in continuous and rotational tobacco cropping systems in the mountain lands of Yunnan, China. Our results showed that distinct co-occurrence patterns and driving forces for abundant and rare taxa across the different cropping systems. The abundant taxa were mainly constrained by stochastic processes in both cropping systems. In contrast, rare taxa in continuous cropping fields were mainly influenced by environmental perturbation (cropping practice), while governed by deterministic processes under rotational cropping. The α-diversity indices of rare taxa tended to be higher than those of the abundant ones in the two cropping systems. Furthermore, the network topologies of rare taxa were more complex than those of the abundant taxa in the two cropping systems. These results highlight that rare taxa rather than abundant ones play important roles in maintaining ecosystem diversity and sustaining the stability of ecosystem functions, especially in continuous cropping systems.

Unraveling the spatial–temporal distribution patterns of soil abundant and rare bacterial communities in China’s subtropical mountain forest

“…The results imply that soil physico-chemical properties made different contributions to the abundant and rare bacterial communities in the different season. This concurs with earlier study conducted by Su et al (2022) , which also observed distinct responses of these two communities to soil properties. First, soil physical properties, especially soil water content and temperature may be predictors of the seasonal changes of bacterial communities ( Berg et al, 1998 ).…”

“…To date, numerous studies have been conducted on abundant and rare bacterial communities in divergent ecosystems ( Du et al, 2020 ; Wang et al, 2021b ; Zhao et al, 2022 ; Zhang et al, 2023 ). However, inconsistent results have been reported regarding the community diversities and driving factors of abundant and rare bacteria ( Hou et al, 2020 ; Su et al, 2022 ). Therefore, comparing the distribution patterns and drivers of soil abundant and rare bacterial community diversities in mountain ecosystems may provide more insightful knowledge about soil bacterial communities.…”

Distinct prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities and networks in two agricultural fields of central Japan with different histories of maize–cabbage rotation

“…2 ). These fungal and bacterial phyla have been commonly detected in other studies on crop rotations 9 , 12 , 18 , 22 , 24 , 25 , 27 , 32 , 33 , 36 , 37 . We found different bacterial phylum compositions between two field soils, where the relative abundance of the Actinomycetota phylum in field_1 soils was clearly higher than that in field_2 soils (Fig.…”

“…Regarding the communities in soils under crop rotation, many studies have indicated distinct β-diversities of soil bacteria and/or fungi between mono- and rotation-cropping 5 , 6 , 8 , 10 , 12 , 14 – 18 , 20 – 22 , 24 , 25 , 27 , 33 or among crop rotations with different crops and rotation sequences, places, and/or periods 5 , 10 , 11 , 15 , 18 – 22 , 24 , 25 , 32 , 33 ; however, the details of soil biota that change with plant growth have not been clarified in a crop-rotation cycle. We showed that the taxonomic variations indicated by β-diversities in the four sample groups were clearly distinguished by crops as well as by fields (Fig.…”

Soil microbial subcommunity assembly mechanisms are highly variable and intimately linked to their ecological and functional traits

“…Long-term homogeneous selection can also lead to the enrichment of soil-borne pathogens (Wu et al, 2019(Wu et al, , 2020. Therefore, performing crop rotation can be conducive to increasing soil microbial diversity and decreasing soil-borne pathogens in the study region (Su et al, 2022).…”