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Responses of Soil Bacterial Communities to Nitrogen Deposition and Precipitation Increment Are Closely Linked with Aboveground Community Variation

  • Soil Microbiology
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Abstract

It has been predicted that precipitation and atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition will increase in northern China; yet, ecosystem responses to the interactive effects of water and N remain largely unknown. In particular, responses of belowground microbial community to projected global change and their potential linkages to aboveground macro-organisms are rarely studied. In this study, we examined the responses of soil bacterial diversity and community composition to increased precipitation and multi-level N deposition in a temperate steppe in Inner Mongolia, China, and explored the diversity linkages between aboveground and belowground communities. It was observed that N addition caused the significant decrease in bacterial alpha-diversity and dramatic changes in community composition. In addition, we documented strong correlations of alpha- and beta-diversity between plant and bacterial communities in response to N addition. It was found that N enriched the so-called copiotrophic bacteria, but reduced the oligotrophic groups, primarily by increasing the soil inorganic N content and carbon availability and decreasing soil pH. We still highlighted that increased precipitation tended to alleviate the effects of N on bacterial diversity and dampen the plant-microbe connections induced by N. The counteractive effects of N addition and increased precipitation imply that even though the ecosystem diversity and function are predicted to be negatively affected by N deposition in the coming decades; the combination with increased precipitation may partially offset this detrimental effect.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB15010302 and XDB15010103), the State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. LFSE2015-16), and Program of the National Science Foundation of China (41371251 and 31370009). We thank the Duolun Restoration Ecology Research Station, Inner Mongolia, for providing the experimental sites.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No.72 Wenhua Road, Shenyang, 110016, China

    Hui Li, Zhuwen Xu, Shan Yang, Xiaobin Li, Ruzhen Wang, Jiangping Cai, Fei Yao, Xingguo Han & Yong Jiang

  2. College of Environmental Science, Shenyang University, Shenyang, 110044, China

    Shan Yang & Yuge Zhang

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Xiaobin Li, Jiangping Cai & Fei Yao

  4. Department of Biological Sciences, Institute for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies (IBEST), University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, 83844, USA

    Eva M. Top

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  1. Hui Li
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Table S1

Two-way ANOVAs with a split-plot design on the effect of water addition (W) and nitrogen addition (N) on soil properties and plant variables. (DOCX 18 kb)

Table S2

Two-way ANOVAs with a split-plot design on the effect of water addition (W) and nitrogen addition (N) on bacterial alpha-diversities. (DOCX 15 kb)

Figure S1

Non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (NMDS) plots of the bacterial communities based on unweighted UniFrac distances (a) and weighted UniFrac distances (b). (DOCX 82 kb)

Table S3

Adonis analysis of the effect of water addition (W) and nitrogen deposition (N) on the bacterial community composition based on Bray-Curtis dissimilarities and Unifrac distances (permutation = 999). (DOCX 16 kb)

Figure S2

Beta-diversity correlation of aboveground and belowground communities under regular precipitation (a) and increased precipitation (b) conditions. Bacterial community distances were measured by OTU-based Bray-Curtis matrices. Bray-Curtis distances of plant community were computed based on biomass of each grass species. (DOCX 33 kb)

Figure S3

Mean relative abundances of dominant taxonomic group in soils treated with nitrogen and water. Phylum-level classification (a), class-level classification (b), family-level classification (c), order-level classification (d),and genus-level classification (e). (DOCX 176 kb)

Table S4

Spearman’s rank correlations between the relative abundances of the dominant bacterial phyla and the soil/plant variables. The white panels represent the bacterial group whose abundance increased with N gradients, the light gray panels represent the phyla whose abundance remain unchanged under N amendments, and the gray panels generally collects the bacterial phyla whose abundance decreased with N gradients. In general, the relative abundance of bacterial phyla grouped in white panel showed positive correlation with C/N ratio, inorganic N, soil carbon availability index (CAI), and plant biomass, but negatively correlated with soil pH and microbial biomass. In contrast, the gray-panel phyla showed the exact reverse pattern. (DOCX 18 kb)

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Li, H., Xu, Z., Yang, S. et al. Responses of Soil Bacterial Communities to Nitrogen Deposition and Precipitation Increment Are Closely Linked with Aboveground Community Variation. Microb Ecol 71, 974–989 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-016-0730-z

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