Microbial Community in the Permafrost Thaw Gradient in the South of the Vitim Plateau (Buryatia, Russia)

Abstract

Soil microbial communities play key roles in biogeochemical cycles and greenhouse gas formation during the decomposition of the released organic matter in the thawing permafrost. The aim of our research was to assess the taxonomic prokaryotic diversity in soil-ecological niches of the Darkhituy-Khaimisan transect during the initial period of soil thawing. We investigated changes in the microbial communities present in the active layer of four sites representing distinct habitats (larch forest, birch forest, meadow steppe and thermokarst lake). We explore the relationship between the biogeochemical differences among habitats and the active layer microbial community via a spatial (across habitats, and with depth through the active layer) community survey using high-throughput Illumina sequencing. Microbial communities showed significant differences between active and frozen layers and across ecosystem types, including a high relative abundance of Alphaproteobacteria, Firmicutes, Crenarchaeota, Bacteroidota and Gemmatimonadota in the active layer and a high relative abundance of Actinobacteriota and Desulfobacterota in the frozen layer. Soil pH, temperature and moisture were the most significant parameters underlying the variations in the microbial community composition. CCA suggested that the differing environmental conditions between the four soil habitats had strong influences on microbial distribution and diversity and further explained the variability of soil microbial community structures.

Permafrost microbial communities follow shifts in vegetation, soils, and megafauna extinctions in Late Pleistocene NW North America

“…Rather our Bison , Mammuthus , and Discrotonyx sedaDNA has strong positive correlations here with Clavibacter , Amycolatopsis , Streptomyces , Micromonospora , Pseudonocardia , Methanobrevibacter , and Microlunatus . These species have been found previously to be associated with either cold/permafrost sediments (Deng et al., 2015; Gilichinsky et al., 2008; Wang, Wang, et al., 2021; Zaitseva et al., 2022) or Pleistocene megafauna (Jorns et al., 2020; van Bergeijk et al., 2022).…”