Distribution patterns of microbial communities in ultramafic landscape: a metagenetic approach highlights the strong relationships between diversity and environmental traits

Abstract

Microbial species richness and assemblages across ultramafic ecosystems were investigated to assess the relationship between their distributional patterns and environmental traits. The structure of microorganism communities in the Koniambo massif, New Caledonia, was investigated using a metagenetic approach correlated with edaphic and floristic factors. Vegetation cover and soil properties significantly shaped the large phylogenetic distribution of operational taxonomic unit within microbial populations, with a mean per habitat of 3.477 (±317) for bacteria and 712 (±43) for fungi. Using variance partitioning, we showed that the effect of aboveground vegetation was the most significant descriptor for both bacterial and fungal communities. The floristic significant predictors explained 43% of the variation for both the bacterial and fungal community structures, while the edaphic significant predictors explained only 32% and 31% of these variations, respectively. These results confirm the previous hypothesis that the distribution of microorganisms was more structured by the vegetation cover rather than the edaphic characteristics and that microbial diversity is not limited in ultramafic ecosystems.

Environmental and Geographical Factors Structure Soil Microbial Diversity in New Caledonian Ultramafic Substrates: A Metagenomic Approach

“…A very recent study conducted at one site on a different isolated ultramafic Massif in New Caledonia, namely the ‘Koniambo Massif’, indicated an effect from the aboveground vegetation and edaphic parameters on microbial composition and abundance using a 454 pyrosequencing approach [82]. As previously indicated, the results obtained in the present study confirm such patterns.…”

“…Bacterial phyla composition showed a very high proportion of Planctomycetes. To our knowledge, such a pattern has never been observed [86,82] and could be, as for Ascomycota, an indicator of past disturbances, but that occurred there much longer ago. Furthermore, soil bacterial and fungal communities were influenced by diverse edaphic parameters as well as by the interplay between them.…”

“…Studies conducted on New Caledonian ultramafic substrates indicated that in the natural environment, the bacterial community was dominated by Proteobacteria and Acidobacteria [81,82]. In other geographic regions, Actinobacteria and/or Acidobacteria were observed as the dominant phyla [83–85].…”

Soil microbial diversity during 30 years of grassland restoration on the Loess Plateau, China: Tight linkages with plant diversity

“…As bacteria and fungi display distinct phenotypes, phylogenies, and substrate utilization capacities, vegetation and soil properties may elicit different effects on microbial communities. Bordez et al () reported that the composition of both bacterial and fungal communities was shaped by vegetation cover rather than edaphic properties in a tropical ecosystem. In addition, edaphic properties structured mainly bacterial communities, whereas plant communities governed fungal community turnover in an old‐field chronosequence (Cline & Zak, ).…”

Bacterial community diversity in the rhizosphere of nickel hyperaccumulator plant species from Borneo Island (Malaysia)

“…These results concur not only with studies that use cultivation-based approaches (Abou-Shanab et al, 2010;Alvarez-López et al, 2016) but also with studies based on molecular techniques using highthroughput sequencing techniques. These studies underline that these three phyla were predominant in different environments with contaminated and non-contaminated soils (Roesch et al, 2007;Buée et al, 2009b;Chu et al, 2010;Zhao et al, 2014;Bordez et al, 2016;Saad et al, 2017) but also in the rhizosphere of hyperaccumulators found in temperate climate such as Albania or Greece (Lopez et al, 2017(Lopez et al, , 2019a. Many studies suggest that Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria are the most common phyla in the rhizosphere of many plant species (Green and Bohannan, 2006;Singh et al, 2007;Kaiser et al, 2016) and bacteria belonging to these two phyla have been defined as copiotrophic (Fierer et al, 2007;Kopecky et al, 2011;Lienhard et al, 2014).…”