BioProject

Revealing the relationship between plants and soil microorganisms is important for understanding biodiversity maintenance, community stability, and ecosystem functioning. More...

Revealing the relationship between plants and soil microorganisms is important for understanding biodiversity maintenance, community stability, and ecosystem functioning. However, the differences in community assembly and co-occurrence network structure of soil fungi and bacteria along a subtropical tree species richness gradient are poorly documented. Here we examined soil fungal and bacterial communities in a Chinese subtropical tree species richness experiment (from 1 to 16 species), using Illumina Miseq sequencing techniques. Tree species richness had no significant effect on the diversity of fungi and bacteria. The neutral community and normalized stochasticity ratio models showed that the fungal community assembly was predominantly structured by deterministic process, whereas the bacterial community assembly was predominantly shaped by stochastic process. Network analysis showed that fungal co-occurrence network was less complex than bacterial co-occurrence network, and the complexity of co-occurrence network of fungi, but not that of bacteria, was decreased with the increasing tree species richness. Fungal co-occurrence network was influenced mainly by tree species richness and less by soil (carbon : nitrogen ratio), but bacterial co-occurrence network was affected by soil (pH) and spatial distance. This study highlights the distinct community assembly processes and interactions of fungi and bacteria in the subtropical plant diversity forest. Less...