Environmental selection overturns the decay relationship of soil prokaryotic community over geographic distance across grassland biotas

Though being fundamental to global diversity distribution, little is known about the geographic pattern of soil microorganisms across different biotas on a large scale. Here, we investigated soil prokaryotic communities from Chinese northern grasslands on a scale up to 4000 km in both alpine and tem...

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Published ineLife Vol. 11
Main Authors Zhang, Biao, Xue, Kai, Zhou, Shutong, Wang, Kui, Liu, Wenjing, Xu, Cong, Cui, Lizhen, Li, Linfeng, Ran, Qinwei, Wang, Zongsong, Hu, Ronghai, Hao, Yanbin, Cui, Xiaoyong, Wang, Yanfen
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published England eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 24.01.2022
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Subjects
Biodiversity
Biogeography
Biota
China
Confidence intervals
distance-decay
Ecology
Ecosystem
Grassland
Grasslands
microbial community
Microorganisms
prokaryote
Prokaryotic Cells
Soil - chemistry
Soil Microbiology
Soil microorganisms
Stochastic models
U-shape
China
Tibetan Plateau
Inner Mongolia China
ecology
microbial community
biota
U-shape
prokaryote
distance-decay
grassland
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Summary:Though being fundamental to global diversity distribution, little is known about the geographic pattern of soil microorganisms across different biotas on a large scale. Here, we investigated soil prokaryotic communities from Chinese northern grasslands on a scale up to 4000 km in both alpine and temperate biotas. Prokaryotic similarities increased over geographic distance after tipping points of 1760-1920 km, generating a significant U-shape pattern. Such pattern was likely due to decreased disparities in environmental heterogeneity over geographic distance when across biotas, supported by three lines of evidences: (1) prokaryotic similarities still decreased with the environmental distance, (2) environmental selection dominated prokaryotic assembly, and (3) short-term environmental heterogeneity followed the U-shape pattern spatially, especially attributed to dissolved nutrients. In sum, these results demonstrate that environmental selection overwhelmed the geographic 'distance' effect when across biotas, overturning the previously well-accepted geographic pattern for microbes on a large scale.
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ISSN:2050-084X
2050-084X
DOI:10.7554/eLife.70164