Diurnal Temperature Variation and Plants Drive Latitudinal Patterns in Seasonal Dynamics of Soil Microbial Community

Seasonality, an exogenous driver, motivates the biological and ecological temporal dynamics of animal and plant communities. Underexplored microbial temporal endogenous dynamics hinders the prediction of microbial response to climate change. To elucidate temporal dynamics of microbial communities, temporal turnover rates, phylogenetic relatedness, and species interactions were integrated to compare those of a series of forest ecosystems along latitudinal gradients. The seasonal turnover rhythm of microbial communities, estimated by the slope (w value) of similarity-time decay relationship, was spatially structured across the latitudinal gradient, which may be caused by a mixture of both diurnal temperature variation and seasonal patterns of plants. Statistical analyses revealed that diurnal temperature variation instead of average temperature imposed a positive and considerable effect alone and also jointly with plants. Due to higher diurnal temperature variation with more climatic niches, microbial communities might evolutionarily adapt into more dispersed phylogenetic assembly based on the standardized effect size of MNTD metric, and ecologically form higher community resistance and resiliency with stronger network interactions among species. Archaea and the bacterial groups of Chloroflexi, Alphaproteobacteria, and Deltaproteobacteria were sensitive to diurnal temperature variation with greater turnover rates at higher latitudes, indicating that greater diurnal temperature fluctuation imposes stronger selective pressure on thermal specialists, because bacteria and archaea, single-celled organisms, have extreme short generation period compared to animal and plant. Our findings thus illustrate that the dynamics of microbial community and species interactions are crucial to assess ecosystem stability to climate variations in an increased climatic variability era

Increased precipitation accelerates soil organic matter turnover associated with microbial community composition in topsoil of the alpine grassland on the eastern Tibetan Plateau

Large quantities of carbon are stored in the alpine grassland of the Tibetan Plateau (TP), where is extremely sensitive to climate change. However, it remains unclear whether soil organic matter (SOM) in different layers responds to climate change analogously, and whether microbial communities play vital roles in SOM turnover of topsoil. In this study we measured and collected SOM turnover byThe accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author