Contrasting elevational diversity patterns between eukaryotic soil microbes and plants

Abstract

The diversity of eukaryotic macroorganisms such as animals and plants usually declines with increasing elevation and latitude. By contrast, the community structure of prokaryotes such as soil bacteria does not generally correlate with elevation or latitude, suggesting that differences in fundamental cell biology and/or body size strongly influence diversity patterns. To distinguish the influences of these two factors, soil eukaryotic microorganism community structure was investigated in six representative vegetation sites along an elevational gradient from forest to alpine tundra on Changbai Mountain in Northeast China, and compared with our previous determination of soil bacterial community structure along the same gradient. Using bar‐coded pyrosequencing, we found strong site differences in eukaryotic microbial community composition. However, diversity of the total eukaryotic microorganism community (or just the fungi or protists alone) did not correlate with elevation. Instead, the patterns of diversity and composition in the total eukaryotic microbial community (and in the protist community alone) were closely correlated with soil pH, suggesting that just as for bacteria, acidity is a particularly important determinant of eukaryotic microbial distributions. By contrast, as expected, plant diversity at the same sites declined along our elevational gradient. These results together suggest that elevational diversity patterns exhibited by eukaryotic microorganisms are fundamentally different from those of plants.

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

“…Our finding here L linear regression, Q quadratic regression **P < 0.01, *P < 0.05 parallels the studies of microbes that bacterial diversity do not follow the elevational diversity patterns of macroorganisms (Fierer et al 2011;Shen et al 2014). Hillebrand and Azovsky (2001) pointed out that small size strongly promotes high dispersal ability, and large population size and short generation times may result in a better chance of long-distance dispersal (Finlay 2002;McCain 2006).…”

“…As the most important feature in determining bacterial distribution in our study, soil pH generally found to be the most important identifiable factor controlling soil bacterial diversity. The important role of pH has recently been found to influence bacterial diversity on horizontal soils (Griffiths et al 2011;Philippot et al 2013), and vertical soils across an elevational gradient (Xiong et al 2012;Shen et al 2014). The finding that diversity of bacteria was positively related to pH was consistent with that from a pH controlled experiment indicated lower pH was stressful for most taxa (Rousk et al 2010).…”

Vegetation-Associated Impacts on Arctic Tundra Bacterial and Microeukaryotic Communities

“…Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) ordinations were generated using the vegan tool of R, version 2.3.0 (49), on the basis of Bray-Curtis dissimilarities. In order to describe biodiversity, which incorporates the phylogenetic difference between species, Faith's index (50), which has been extensively used in the literature (14,26), was used to calculate phylogenetic diversity. Species-level measurement was assessed by use of the Shannon index (H=).…”

“…In particular, the pyrosequencing profiles of rRNA genes indicated that both bacterial and fungal communities clearly differed in three plateau habitats. In a montane elevation gradient study, vegetation-type zonations were associated with distinct microeukaryotic, fungal, and protistan microbial communities (26). Microscopic analysis showed that the bacterial and microeukaryotic structure changed with plant species in Sphagnum peatlands when perturbed by warming (35).…”

“…The diversity and composition of nematode, testate amoeba, and fungal communities can also be influenced by soil properties (23)(24)(25), including acidity, although this may not be true of all microbial metazoans (26). Notwithstanding our appreciation that soil characteristics can affect both bacterial and microeukaryotic communities, the key factors that structure communities of different microbial groups among vegetation types in Arctic tundra are poorly understood.…”