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The Biogeography of Ammonia-Oxidizing Bacterial Communities in Soil

  • Soil Microbiology
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Abstract

Although ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) are likely to play a key role in the soil nitrogen cycle, we have only a limited understanding of how the diversity and composition of soil AOB communities change across ecosystem types. We examined 23 soils collected from across North America and used sequence-based analyses to compare the AOB communities in each of the distinct soils. Using 97% 16S rRNA sequence similarity groups, we identified only 24 unique AOB phylotypes across all of the soils sampled. The majority of the sequences collected were in the Nitrosospira lineages (representing 80% of all the sequences collected), and AOB belonging to Nitrosospira cluster 3 were particularly common in our clone libraries and ubiquitous across the soil types. Community composition was highly variable across the collected soils, and similar ecosystem types did not always harbor similar AOB communities. We did not find any significant correlations between AOB community composition and measures of N availability. From the suite of environmental variables measured, we found the strongest correlation between temperature and AOB community composition; soils exposed to similar mean annual temperatures tended to have similar AOB communities. This finding is consistent with previous studies and suggests that temperature selects for specific AOB lineages. Given that distinct AOB taxa are likely to have unique functional attributes, the biogeographical patterns exhibited by soil AOB may be directly relevant to understanding soil nitrogen dynamics under changing environmental conditions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the many individuals who donated their time and resources to help with soil collection. We particularly want to thank Ben Colman for his help with the soil analyses. In addition, both Josh Schimel and Rob Jackson provided valuable logistical and intellectual support for this project. Four anonymous reviewers provided very useful comments on a previous draft of this manuscript. This work was supported by grants awarded to N.F. from the National Science Foundation (MCB 0610970) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a Smithsonian Institution Fellowship to K.C., and a National Science Foundation grant (DEB 0516400) to P.M.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA

    Noah Fierer

  2. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, CIRES UCB 216, Boulder, CO, 80309-0216, USA

    Noah Fierer

  3. Stratus Consulting, Inc., Washington, DC, 20036, USA

    Karen M. Carney

  4. School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    M. Claire Horner-Devine

  5. Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, MD, 21037, USA

    J. Patrick Megonigal

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  1. Noah Fierer
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  4. J. Patrick Megonigal
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Correspondence to Noah Fierer.

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Fierer, N., Carney, K.M., Horner-Devine, M.C. et al. The Biogeography of Ammonia-Oxidizing Bacterial Communities in Soil. Microb Ecol 58, 435–445 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-009-9517-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-009-9517-9

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