Dataset Information

Rapid recovery of soil bacterial communities after wildfire in a Chinese boreal forest.

ABSTRACT: Fires affect hundreds of millions of hectares annually. Above-ground community composition and diversity after fire have been studied extensively, but effects of fire on soil bacterial communities remain largely unexamined despite the central role of bacteria in ecosystem recovery and functioning. We investigated responses of bacterial community to forest fire in the Greater Khingan Mountains, China, using tagged pyrosequencing. Fire altered soil bacterial community composition substantially and high-intensity fire significantly decreased bacterial diversity 1-year-after-burn site. Bacterial community composition and diversity returned to similar levels as observed in controls (no fire) after 11 years. The understory vegetation community typically takes 20-100 years to reach pre-fire states in boreal forest, so our results suggest that soil bacteria could recover much faster than plant communities. Finally, soil bacterial community composition significantly co-varied with soil pH, moisture content, NH4(+) content and carbon/nitrogen ratio (P < 0.05 in all cases) in wildfire-perturbed soils, suggesting that fire could indirectly affect bacterial communities by altering soil edaphic properties.

SUBMITTER: Xiang X

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3899593 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Rapid recovery of soil bacterial communities after wildfire in a Chinese boreal forest.

Xiang Xingjia X Shi Yu Y Yang Jian J Kong Jianjian J Lin Xiangui X Zhang Huayong H Zeng Jun J Chu Haiyan H

Scientific reports 20140123

Fires affect hundreds of millions of hectares annually. Above-ground community composition and diversity after fire have been studied extensively, but effects of fire on soil bacterial communities remain largely unexamined despite the central role of bacteria in ecosystem recovery and functioning. We investigated responses of bacterial community to forest fire in the Greater Khingan Mountains, China, using tagged pyrosequencing. Fire altered soil bacterial community composition substantially and ...[more]

PMID: 24452061

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Project description:Bacteria and fungi are important mediators of biogeochemical processes and play essential roles in the establishment of plant communities, which makes knowledge about their recovery after extreme disturbances valuable for understanding ecosystem development. However, broad ecological differences between bacterial and fungal organisms, such as growth rates, stress tolerance, and substrate utilization, suggest they could follow distinct trajectories and show contrasting dynamics during recovery. In this study, we analyzed both the intra-annual variability and decade-scale recovery of bacterial and fungal communities in a chronosequence of reclaimed mined soils using next-generation sequencing to quantify their abundance, richness, ?-diversity, taxonomic composition, and cooccurrence network properties. Bacterial communities shifted gradually, with overlapping ?-diversity patterns across chronosequence ages, while shifts in fungal communities were more distinct among different ages. In addition, the magnitude of intra-annual variability in bacterial ?-diversity was comparable to the changes across decades of chronosequence age, while fungal communities changed minimally across months. Finally, the complexity of bacterial cooccurrence networks increased with chronosequence age, while fungal networks did not show clear age-related trends. We hypothesize that these contrasting dynamics of bacteria and fungi in the chronosequence result from (i) higher growth rates for bacteria, leading to higher intra-annual variability; (ii) higher tolerance to environmental changes for fungi; and (iii) stronger influence of vegetation on fungal communities.IMPORTANCE Both bacteria and fungi play essential roles in ecosystem functions, and information about their recovery after extreme disturbances is important for understanding whole-ecosystem development. Given their many differences in phenotype, phylogeny, and life history, a comparison of different bacterial and fungal recovery patterns improves the understanding of how different components of the soil microbiota respond to ecosystem recovery. In this study, we highlight key differences between soil bacteria and fungi during the restoration of reclaimed mine soils in the form of long-term diversity patterns, intra-annual variability, and potential interaction networks. Cooccurrence networks revealed increasingly complex bacterial community interactions during recovery, in contrast to much simpler and more isolated fungal network patterns. This study compares bacterial and fungal cooccurrence networks and reveals cooccurrences persisting through successional ages.

Dataset Information

Rapid recovery of soil bacterial communities after wildfire in a Chinese boreal forest.

Publications

Rapid recovery of soil bacterial communities after wildfire in a Chinese boreal forest.

Similar Datasets

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