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Spatial Scaling Effects on Soil Bacterial Communities in Malaysian Tropical Forests

  • Environmental Microbiology
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Abstract

Spatial scaling to some extent determines biodiversity patterns in larger organisms, but its role in microbial diversity patterns is much less understood. Some studies have shown that bacterial community similarity decreases with distance, whereas others do not support this. Here, we studied soil bacterial communities of tropical rainforest in Malaysia at two spatial scales: a local scale with samples spaced every 5 m over a 150-m transect, and a regional scale with samples 1 to 1,800 km apart. PCR-amplified soil DNA for the bacterial 16S rRNA gene targeting the V1–V3 region was pyrosequenced using Roche/454 GS FLX Titanium platform. A ranked partial Mantel test showed a weak correlation between spatial distance and whole bacterial community dissimilarity, but only at the local scale. In contrast, environmental distance was highly correlated with community dissimilarity at both spatial scales, stressing the greater role of environmental variables rather than spatial distance in determining bacterial community variation at different spatial scales. Soil pH was the only environmental parameter that significantly explained the variance in bacterial community at the local scale, whereas total nitrogen and elevation were additional important factors at the regional scale. We obtained similar results at both scales when only the most abundant OTUs were analyzed. A variance partitioning analysis showed that environmental variables contributed more to bacterial community variation than spatial distance at both scales. In total, our results support a strong influence of the environment in determining bacterial community composition in the rainforests of Malaysia. However, it is possible that the remaining spatial distance effect is due to some of the myriad of other environmental factors which were not considered here, rather than dispersal limitation.

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Acknowledgments

Jonathan Adams was funded by a Brain Gain grant from the Government of Malaysia and by an SNU New Faculty Research Grant. This work was partly supported by a grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) (NRF-2013-031400). We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their help in improving the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Seoul National University, Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 151-747, South Korea

    Binu M. Tripathi, Larisa Lee-Cruz, Mincheol Kim, Dharmesh Singh, Jongsik Chun & Jonathan M. Adams

  2. Institute of Tropical Forestry and Forest Products (INTROP), University Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor, 43400, Malaysia

    Rusea Go, Noraini A. A. Shukor & Jonathan M. Adams

  3. Department of Biology, Faculty of Sciences, University Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor, 43400, Malaysia

    Rusea Go

  4. Department of Land Management, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor, 43400, Malaysia

    M. H. A. Husni

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  1. Binu M. Tripathi
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Correspondence to Jonathan M. Adams.

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Tripathi, B.M., Lee-Cruz, L., Kim, M. et al. Spatial Scaling Effects on Soil Bacterial Communities in Malaysian Tropical Forests. Microb Ecol 68, 247–258 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-014-0404-7

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