Bacterial Succession and Community Dynamics of the Emerging Leaf Phyllosphere in Spring

Every year, deciduous trees shed their leaves, and when new leaves emerge next spring, they establish a characteristic bacterial leaf community. In this exploratory study, we assessed the bacterial phyllosphere (aboveground plant surfaces) of eight London plane trees (Platanus × acerifolia) in Antwerp and Milan by sampling weekly during leaf emergence and expansion. We sampled the surfaces of different tree compartments: leaves, leaf buds, branches, and trunk, for up to 6 weeks. Phyllosphere community composition was most strongly determined by tree compartment. Only the communities on the emerging leaves showed changing dynamics over time. The rate of change in the leaf phyllosphere composition, expressed as the beta dissimilarity between consecutive time points, was very high following leaf emergence, with decreasing speed over time, indicating that these communities stabilize over time. We also identified cooccurring groups of bacteria associated with potential stages of ecological succession on the leaves and accordingly named them general cluster, early cluster, middle cluster, and late cluster. Taxa of the general cluster were not only more abundant than the others on leaves, but they were also widespread on other tree compartments. The late cluster was most pronounced in trees surrounded by trafficked urban land use. This study mainly generates hypotheses on the ecological succession on the emerging leaves of deciduous trees in urban environments and contributes to understanding the development of the tree leaf phyllosphere in spring. IMPORTANCE Improving our understanding of phyllosphere ecology is key in successfully applying bacterial biological agents or modulating the leaf microbiome in order to achieve valuable ecosystem services, such as plant protection, plant growth, air purification, and developing a healthy human immune system. Modulation of the phyllosphere microbiome in the field works only with variable success. To improve the impact of our applications in the field, a better understanding of the ecological principles governing phyllosphere dynamics is required. This exploratory study demonstrates how the combination of different analyses of a chronosequence of bacterial communities can provide new ecological insights. With a limited number of sampled trees, we demonstrated different indications of ecological succession of bacterial communities in the leaves and observed a potential impact of intensely trafficked land use becoming apparent in the leaf bacterial communities approximately 3 weeks after leaf emergence, consisting of a separate stage in community development.