Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Information Visualization

International audienc

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Visualization

International audienc

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

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : The data and the R script describing the steps of the analyses are deposited in the Dryad repository doi:10.5061/dryad.0k6djhb4z. Raw bacterial and fungal sequences are deposited in NCBI SRA database with the following accession numbers PRJNA966933 and PRJNA970213, respectively.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). Our results revealed that bacteria were associated with particular soil properties (such as base saturation) and both bacteria and fungi were associated with plant community composition across sites and within the majority of sites. Moreover, a discernible microbial community signal emerged, clearly distinguishing high and low-productivity soils across different grasslands independent of their location in the world. Hence, regional productivity differences may be typified by characteristic soil microbial communities across the grassland biome. These results could encourage future research aiming to predict the general effects of global changes on soil microbial community composition in grasslands and to discriminate fertile from infertile systems using generally applicable microbial indicators.European Research Council grant; GINOP- 2.3.2- 15-2016-00019 project; Methusalem funding of the Research Council UA; Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO).http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mec2024-10-24hj2024Plant Production and Soil ScienceNon