Differential responses of the acidobacterial community in the topsoil and subsoil to fire disturbance in Pinus tabulaeformis stands

Weike Li; Xiaodong Liu; Shukui Niu

doi:10.7717/peerj.8047

Differential responses of the acidobacterial community in the topsoil and subsoil to fire disturbance in Pinus tabulaeformis stands

PeerJ. 2019 Dec 11:7:e8047. doi: 10.7717/peerj.8047. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Weike Li^{1

2}, Xiaodong Liu¹, Shukui Niu¹

Affiliations

¹ Beijing Key Laboratory for Forest Resources and Ecosystem Processes, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China.
² Fire Engineering, China Fire and Rescue Institute, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Acidobacteria is found to be dominant and abundant in forest soil, and performs specific ecological functions (such as cellulose decomposition and photosynthetic capacity, etc.). However, relative limited is known about its changing patterns after a fire interruption. In this study, the response of soil Acidobacteria to a wildfire disturbance was investigated using the Illumina MiSeq sequencing system. The research area was classified by different severities of fire damage (high, moderate, and low severity, and an unburnt area), and samples were collected from various soil layers (0-10 cm as topsoil; 10-20 cm as subsoil). We obtained a total of 986,036 sequence reads; 31.77% of them belonged to Acidobacteria. Overall, 18 different Acidobacteria subgroups were detected, with subgroups 4, 6, 1, 3, and 2 the most abundant, accounting for 31.55%, 30.84%, 17.42%, 6.02%, and 5.81% of acidobacterial sequences across all samples, respectively. Although no significant differences in acidobacterial diversity were found in the same soil layer across different fire severities, we observed significantly lower numbers of reads, but higher Shannon and Simpson indices, in the topsoil of the high-severity fire area than in the subsoil. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis and permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) also revealed significant differences in the acidobacterial community structure between the two soil layers. Soil pH, total nitrogen, NH₄ ⁺-N, the Shannon index of understory vegetation and canopy density were the major drivers for acidobacterial community structure in the topsoil, while soil pH and organic matter were significant factors in the subsoil. A variance partitioning analysis (VPA) showed that edaphic factors explained the highest variation both in the topsoil (15.6%) and subsoil (56.3%). However, there are large gaps in the understanding of this field of research that still need to be explored in future studies.

Keywords: Acidobacterial subgroups; Fire severity; Illumina MiSeq sequencing; Pinus tabulaeformis; Soil layers.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (31770696), the Key Project of National Key Research and Development Plan (2017YFD0600106) and the College of Forestry/Beijing Key Laboratory of Forest Resources and Ecosystem Process, Beijing Forestry University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.