Consistent predictors of microbial community composition across spatial scales in grasslands reveal low context-dependency

  • Dajana Radujkovic (Creator)
  • Sara Vicca (Creator)
  • Margaretha van Rooyen (Creator)
  • Peter Wilfahrt (Creator)
  • Leslie Brown (Creator)
  • Anke Jentsch (Creator)
  • Kurt O. Reinhart (Creator)
  • Charlotte Brown (Creator)
  • Johan De Gruyter (Creator)
  • Gerald Jurasinski (Creator)
  • Diana Askarizadeh (Creator)
  • Sandor Bartha (Creator)
  • Ryan T. Beck (Creator)
  • Theodore Blenkinsopp (Creator)
  • James F. Cahill (Creator)
  • Giandiego Campetella (Creator)
  • Roberto Canullo (Creator)
  • Stefano Chelli (Creator)
  • Lucas Enrico (Creator)
  • Lauchlan H. Fraser (Creator)
  • Xiying Hao (Creator)
  • Hugh A. L. Henry (Creator)
  • Maria Hohn (Creator)
  • Mohammad Hassan Jouri (Creator)
  • Marian Koch (Creator)
  • Rachael Lawrence Lodge (Creator)
  • Frank Yonghong Li (Creator)
  • Janice M. Lord (Creator)
  • Patrick S. Milligan (Creator)
  • Hugjiltu Minggagud (Creator)
  • Todd Palmer (Creator)
  • Birgit Schröder (Creator)
  • Gábor Szabó (Creator)
  • Tongrui Zhang (Creator)
  • Zita Zimmermann (Creator)
  • Erik Verbruggen (Creator)

Dataset

Description

Environmental circumstances shaping soil microbial communities have been studied extensively. However, due to disparate study designs, it has been difficult to resolve whether a globally consistent set of predictors exists, or context-dependency prevails. Here, we used a network of 18 grassland sites (11 of those containing regional plant productivity gradients) to examine i) if similar abiotic or biotic factors predict both large-scale (across sites) and regional-scale (within sites) patterns in bacterial and fungal community composition, and ii) if microbial community composition differs consistently at two levels of regional plant productivity (low vs high). We found that bacteria were consistently associated with certain soil properties and both bacteria and fungi were consistently associated with plant community composition within different sites. Moreover, there was a microbial community signal that clearly distinguished high and low-productivity soils that was shared across different grasslands independent of their location in the world. In this study, we show that there is high congruence between predictors of bacterial and fungal community composition at different spatial scales and that regional productivity differences are typified by characteristic soil microbial communities across the grassland biome. These results suggest that it might be feasible to predict the overall effects of global changes on soil microbial community composition in different grasslands, as well as to discriminate fertile from infertile systems using generally applicable microbial indicators.
Date made availableAug 30 2023
PublisherZENODO

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