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Specific protistan consumers and parasites are responsive to inorganic fertilization in rhizosphere and bulk soils

  • Soils, Sec 1 • Soil Organic Matter Dynamics and Nutrient Cycling • Research Article
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Abstract

Purpose

Protists play important roles in soils by regulating organic matter decomposition, catalysing biogeochemical nutrient cycling processes and maintaining soil fertility and plant productivity, but they remain poorly characterized in the plant-soil system under long-term intensive agricultural management.

Methods

We investigated the impacts of multiple inorganic fertilization regimes on the diversity, composition and potential functions of protists and their interactions with bacteria and fungi in the rhizosphere and bulk soils of sorghum plants in a long-term field experiment.

Results

Protists were dominated by the supergroups Rhizaria, Stramenopiles, Alveolata, Amoebozoa and Archaeplastida in both rhizosphere and bulk soils. The diversity of protists was significantly lower in rhizosphere than bulk soils, and the community compositions of total protists were remarkably different in the two compartments. Inorganic fertilization had no significant impacts on the total protistan diversity or compositions but significantly changed the relative abundances of specific taxa of consumers and parasites. Protists were significantly correlated with bacteria and fungi as revealed by the co-occurrence network analysis, indicating their intensive trophic interactions with bacteria and fungi in soil food webs. Soil properties and the community compositions of bacteria and fungi were important factors shaping the variation in the protistan communities, as revealed by variation partitioning modelling analysis.

Conclusion

Altogether, we provide new information for the impacts of fertilization on the protist communities in rhizosphere and bulk soils and identified specific functional groups of protists that are most responsive to long-term agricultural management.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 31901291) and the China Agriculture Research System (CARS-06–13.5-A20).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Humid Subtropical Eco-Geographical Processes of the Ministry of Education, School of Geographical Sciences, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, 350007, China

    Fangfang Li, Anqi Sun, Li Bi, Yong Zheng, Ji-Zheng He & Hang-Wei Hu

  2. College of Resource and Environment, Shanxi Agricultural University, Taiyuan, 030031, China

    Xiaoyan Jiao

  3. Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Ji-Zheng He & Hang-Wei Hu

Authors
  1. Fangfang Li
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  2. Anqi Sun
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  6. Ji-Zheng He
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Correspondence to Xiaoyan Jiao or Hang-Wei Hu.

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Responsible editor: Huaiying Yao

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Li, F., Sun, A., Jiao, X. et al. Specific protistan consumers and parasites are responsive to inorganic fertilization in rhizosphere and bulk soils. J Soils Sediments 21, 3801–3812 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-021-03052-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-021-03052-4

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