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Microbial Composition and Activity of Natural, Restored, and Reclaimed Wetland Soils: a Case Study of Poyang Lake Basin, China

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Abstract

In this study, we employed pyrosequencing-based analysis of the V4-V6 16S rRNA gene region and community level physiological profiling (CLPP) to characterize and compare bacterial community composition and metabolic activities in order to determine if microbial composition and activity were able to recover in land transitioning from agriculture to natural wetland. The sample sites included natural wetland (with native vegetation), reclaimed for tillage (agriculture), and abandoned tilled (wetland restoration) soils. The entire data set comprised 78,790 good-quality sequences, 62,364 of which were classified in 23 known phyla. The dominant taxonomic groups presented in all samples were Proteobacteria (34.3%), Acidobacteria (15.5%), Verrucomicrobia (6.9%), Chloroflexi (6.3%), Nitrospira (2.6%) and Actinobacteria (2.4%), while 27.1% of the sequences could not be classified to any known phylum. Microbial community composition and activity were found to cluster into two distinct groupings: one associated with agriculture and the other with restored and natural wetlands. The average well colour development (AWCD) based on carbon source utilization pattern was significantly higher in natural and restored wetland soils than in reclaimed soils, suggesting an improvement of soil health. In conclusion, these findings indicated that microbial community composition and activity were affected by land use and may be used to assess the extent of recovery of natural microbial-driven processes during wetland restoration. Furthermore, restored soil microbial communities in this study appear to be tended to a gradual return to those of natural wetland soils with time.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundations of China (Grant No. 31360127, 30860062 and 31660149) and the Open Foundation of MOE Key Laboratory of Poyang Lake Environment and Resource (PYH2015-13) and Nanchang University Seed Grant for Biomedicine (9202-0210210807). We appreciate Dr. Rong J and Lan ZC for invaluable comments on early drafts of this paper, and we also thank two anonymous reviewers for providing comments that helped us improve this paper.

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  1. Ling L. Huang and Wen B. Kou contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Science, Key Laboratory of Poyang Lake Environment and Resource Utilization, Ministry of Education, Nanchang University, Nanchang, 330022, China

    Ling L. Huang, Wen B. Kou, Lan Wu, Zhao Y. Kong & Gang Ge

  2. Department of Biology, University of Maine, Presque Isle, ME, 04769, USA

    Larry Feinstein

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  1. Ling L. Huang
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  2. Wen B. Kou
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  3. Lan Wu
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  4. Larry Feinstein
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Correspondence to Lan Wu or Gang Ge.

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Huang, L.L., Kou, W.B., Wu, L. et al. Microbial Composition and Activity of Natural, Restored, and Reclaimed Wetland Soils: a Case Study of Poyang Lake Basin, China. Wetlands 39 (Suppl 1), 113–123 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-018-1020-y

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