Topsoil and subsoil bacterial community assemblies across different drainage conditions in a mountain environment

High mountainous environments are of particular interest as they play an essential role for life and human societies, while being environments which are highly vulnerable to climate change and land use intensification. Despite this, our knowledge of high mountain soils in South America and their microbial community structure is strikingly scarce, which is of more concern considering the large population that depends on the ecosystem services provided by these areas. Conversely, the Central Andes, located in the Mediterranean region of Chile, has long been studied for its singular flora, whose diversity and endemism has been attributed to the particular geological history and pronounced environmental gradients in short distances. Here, we explore soil properties and microbial community structure depending on drainage class in a well-preserved Andean valley on the lower alpine vegetation belt (~2500 m a.s.l.) at 33.5˚S. This presents an opportunity to determine changes in the overall bacterial community structure across different types of soils and their distinct layers in a soil depth profile of a highly heterogeneous environment.

Five sites closely located (<1.5 km) and distributed in a well preserved Andean valley on the lower alpine vegetation belt (~2500 m a.s.l.) at 33.5˚S were selected based on a pedological approach taking into account soil types, drainage classes and horizons. We analyzed 113 soil samples using high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene to describe bacterial abundance, taxonomic composition, and co-occurrence networks.

Almost 18,427 Amplicon Sequence Variant (ASVs) affiliated to 55 phyla were detected. The bacterial community structure within the same horizons were very similar validating the pedological sampling approach. Bray-Curtis dissimilarity analysis revealed that the structure of bacterial communities in superficial horizons (topsoil) differed from those found in deep horizons (subsoil) in a site-specific manner. However, an overall closer relationship was observed between topsoil as opposed to between subsoil microbial communities. Alpha diversity of soil bacterial communities was higher in topsoil, which also showed more bacterial members interacting and with higher average connectivity compared to subsoils. Finally, abundances of specific taxa could be considered as biological markers in the transition from topsoil to subsoil horizons, like Fibrobacterota, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidota for shallower soils and Chloroflexi, Latescibacterota and Nitrospirota for deeper soils.

The results indicate the importance of the soil drainage conditions for the bacterial community composition, suggesting that information of both structure and their possible ecological relationships, might be useful in clarifying the location of the edge of the topsoil-subsoil transition in mountainous environments.