Spatial scale affects the relative role of stochasticity versus determinism in soil bacterial communities in wheat fields across the North China Plain

作者：Yu Shi, Yuntao Li, Xingjia Xiang, Ruibo Sun, Teng Yang, Dan He, Kaoping Zhang, Yingying Ni, Yong‐Guan Zhu, Jonathan M. Adams, Haiyan Chu · 发表于：Microbiome · 年份：2018 · DOI：10.1186/s40168-018-0409-4 · 被引用次数：461 · 研究领域：Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology、Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics、Polar Research and Ecology

BACKGROUND: The relative importance of stochasticity versus determinism in soil bacterial communities is unclear, as are the possible influences that alter the balance between these. Here, we investigated the influence of spatial scale on the relative role of stochasticity and determinism in agricultural monocultures consisting only of wheat, thereby minimizing the influence of differences in plant species cover and in cultivation/disturbance regime, extending across a wide range of soils and climates of the North China Plain (NCP). We sampled 243 sites across 1092 km and sequenced the 16S rRNA bacterial gene using MiSeq. We hypothesized that determinism would play a relatively stronger role at the broadest scales, due to the strong influence of climate and soil differences in selecting many distinct OTUs of bacteria adapted to the different environments. In order to test the more general applicability of the hypothesis, we also compared with a natural ecosystem on the Tibetan Plateau. RESULTS: Our results revealed that the relative importance of stochasticity vs. determinism did vary with spatial scale, in the direction predicted. On the North China Plain, stochasticity played a dominant role from 150 to 900 km (separation between pairs of sites) and determinism dominated at more than 900 km (broad scale). On the Tibetan Plateau, determinism played a dominant role from 130 to 1200 km and stochasticity dominated at less than 130 km. Among the identifiable deterministic factor...