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Soil Acidification Destabilizes Terrestrial Ecosystems via Decoupling Soil Microbiome.

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Soil pH significantly impacts soil microbial communities. Decreasing pH drives bacterial communities toward convergence and eukaryotic communities toward divergence, affecting ecosystem stability and biodiversity conservation.

Keywords:
bacteriabiodiversity conservationeukaryotaprotected areasα‐diversityβ‐diversity

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Area of Science:

  • Microbial Ecology
  • Environmental Science
  • Biodiversity Conservation

Background:

  • Soil microbiomes are crucial for ecosystem health and stability.
  • Understanding soil microbial beta-diversity is vital for conservation, especially under environmental change.
  • Current knowledge of microbial responses to environmental gradients across multiple ecosystems is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the large-scale distance-decay relationships of bacterial and eukaryotic communities in response to soil pH.
  • To determine how soil pH influences microbial community structure and diversity across diverse Chinese terrestrial ecosystems.
  • To assess the implications of soil pH dynamics for ecosystem stability and biodiversity conservation.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized next-generation sequencing to analyze microbial communities from 207 locations across 4300 km transects.
  • Employed machine learning techniques to analyze community data in relation to soil pH.
  • Examined six typical terrestrial ecosystems in China to capture broad environmental gradients.

Main Results:

  • Soil pH acts as a key driver of microbial beta-diversity, exhibiting divergent effects on bacterial and eukaryotic communities.
  • Decreasing soil pH leads to convergent bacterial communities (lower beta-diversity) and divergent eukaryotic communities (higher beta-diversity).
  • Intensified inter-kingdom competition and community restructuring occur at lower pH levels, with potential decoupling of bacterial and eukaryotic dynamics.

Conclusions:

  • Soil pH is a pivotal variable controlling soil microbiome dynamics at a large scale, influencing ecosystem stability.
  • Climate change-induced soil acidification could lead to divergent shifts in bacterial and eukaryotic communities, impacting ecosystem functions.
  • Soil pH is a cornerstone variable for biodiversity conservation strategies in protected areas, particularly in China.