Abstract
Ecological theory suggests that temporal environmental fluctuations can contribute greatly to diversity maintenance. Given bacteria’s short generation time and rapid responses to environmental change, seasonal climate fluctuations are very likely to play an important role in maintaining the extremely high α-diversity of soil bacterial community, which has been unfortunately neglected in previous studies. Here, with in-depth analyses of two previously published soil bacterial datasets at global scale, we found that soil bacterial α-diversity was positively correlated with both seasonal variations of temperature and precipitation. Furthermore, piecewise structural equation models showed that seasonal variations of temperature or precipitation had weak but significant positive effect on soil bacterial α-diversity in each dataset. However, it is noteworthy that the importance of seasonal climate variations might be underestimated in the above analyses, due to the potential confounding factors (such as vegetation type) and the lack of sampling across seasons. As a supplement, we analyzed a previously published wheat cropland dataset with samples collected in both winter and the following summer across North China Plain. As expected, bacterial α-diversity was positively correlated with seasonal climate variations in the cropland dataset, and climate seasonality explained a larger proportion of variations in bacterial α-diversity. Collectively, these findings implied that fluctuation-dependent mechanisms of diversity maintenance presumably operate in soil bacterial communities. Based on existing evidence, we speculated that the storage effect may be the main mechanism responsible for diversity maintenance in soil bacterial community, but rigorous experimental tests are needed in the future.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
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Acknowledgements
We thank Mohammad Bahram for generously sharing the metadata with us.
Funding
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (31901113, 31901112), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M662951), and Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (2019A1515011879).
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YQH and XFZ conceived the study and analyzed the data together. XFZ wrote the manuscript, with input from all authors.
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Zhao, XF., Shu, WS. & Hao, YQ. Seasonal Climate Variations Promote Bacterial α-Diversity in Soil. Microb Ecol 83, 513–517 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-021-01780-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-021-01780-1