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Bacterial Diversity Patterns Differ in Soils Developing in Sub-tropical and Cool-Temperate Ecosystems

  • Environmental Microbiology
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An Erratum to this article was published on 12 December 2016

Abstract

Microbial diversity patterns have been surveyed in many different soils and ecosystems, but we are unaware of studies comparing similar soils developing from similar parent materials in contrasting climates. In 2008, developmental chronosequences with ages ranging from 105 to 500,000 years across Georgia (GA) and Michigan (MI) were studied to investigate how bacterial community composition and diversity change as a result of local environmental gradients that develop during pedogenesis. Geographic factors were studied between and within locations spanning two scales: (1) regionally between 0.1 and 50 and (2) ∼1700 km apart. The diversity was surveyed using high-throughput pyrosequencing, and variance partitioning was used to describe the effects of spatial, environmental, and spatio-environmental factors on bacterial community composition. At the local scale, variation in bacterial communities was most closely related to environmental factors (rM = 0.59, p = 0.0001). There were differences in bacterial communities between the two locations, indicating spatial biogeography. Estimates of bacterial diversity were much greater in MI (numbers of OTU, ACE, and Chao1) and remained 2–3× greater in MI than GA after removing the effect of soil properties. The large differences in diversity between geographically separated bacterial communities in different climates need further investigation. It is not known if the rare members of the community, which contributed to greater bacterial diversity in GA relative to MI, play an important role in ecosystem function but has been hypothesized to play a role in ecosystem resiliency, resistance, and stability. Further research on the link between bacterial diversity and spatial variability related to climate needs further investigation.

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Acknowledgments

Research was supported by NSF grant (Award Number: 0743516) awarded to Mark Williams, William Whitman, and Kamlesh Jangid

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, Mississippi State University, 117 Dorman Hall, Mississippi State, MS, 39762, USA

    Shankar G. Shanmugam, Zenaida V. Magbanua, Daniel G. Peterson & William L. Kingery

  2. Institute for Genomics, Biocomputing & Biotechnology, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, 39762, USA

    Shankar G. Shanmugam, Zenaida V. Magbanua & Daniel G. Peterson

  3. Department of Microbiology, University of Georgia, 527 Biological Sciences, Athens, GA, 30602, USA

    William B. Whitman

  4. Microbial Culture Collection, National Centre for Cell Science, Pune, 411007, Maharashtra, India

    Kamlesh Jangid

  5. College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Horticulture, 301 Latham Hall, Blacksburg, VA, 24060, USA

    Mark A. Williams

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  1. Shankar G. Shanmugam
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  2. Zenaida V. Magbanua
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  3. Mark A. Williams
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Correspondence to Shankar G. Shanmugam.

Additional information

The original version of this article was revised: The article title was mistakenly amended to “Bacterial diversity patterns differed in two developing ecosystems”.

An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00248-016-0909-3.

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Shanmugam, S.G., Magbanua, Z.V., Williams, M.A. et al. Bacterial Diversity Patterns Differ in Soils Developing in Sub-tropical and Cool-Temperate Ecosystems. Microb Ecol 73, 556–569 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-016-0884-8

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