Applied Soil Ecology
Applied Soil Ecology
5 years ago

Shifts in prokaryotic communities under forest and grassland within a tropical mosaic landscape

The Anthropocene is linked to massive land use changes as a result of human activity. While aboveground changes in biodiversity are well documented, the effects on belowground microbial communities are less understood, yet could impact on many ecosystem functions. Here we aimed to identify differences in belowground microbial diversity between forest and grassland sites in a humid tropical mosaic landscape in Papua New Guinea. Using DNA-based amplicon sequencing targeting the 16S rRNA gene, prokaryotic community composition was assessed from surface soil samples. The composition of prokaryotic communities (beta diversity) differed between forest and grassland sites despite maintaining similar richness (alpha diversity) levels. Changes in community structure were small at higher taxonomic levels, but strong at the operational taxonomic unit (OTU) level but for a small subset of taxa. Changes in community composition between sites (based on Bray-Curtis distance) reflected a large rearrangement with species assemblage (OTU) differing by 68%. The results suggest that ecosystem change in this landscape leads to ecological filtering and selection at lower, but not higher taxonomic levels.

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S0929139317306789

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.