Short-term effects of snow cover manipulation on soil bacterial diversity and community composition

Abstract

Winter snow cover is a major driver of soil microbial processes in high-latitude and high-altitude ecosystems. Warming-induced reduction in snow cover as predicted under future climate scenarios may shift soil bacterial communities with consequences for soil carbon and nutrient cycling. The underlying mechanisms, however, remain elusive. In the present study, we conducted a snow manipulation experiment in a Tibetan spruce forest to explore the immediate and intra-annual legacy effects of snow exclusion on soil bacterial communities. We analyzed bacterial diversity and community composition in the winter (i.e., the deep snow season), in the transitional thawing period, and in the middle of the growing season. Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, and Actinobacteria were dominant phyla across the seasons and snow regimes. Bacterial diversity was generally not particularly sensitive to the absence of snow cover. However, snow exclusion positively affected Simpson diversity in the winter but not in the thawing period and the growing season. Bacterial diversity further tended to be higher in winter than in the growing season. In the winter, the taxonomic composition shifted in response to snow exclusion, while composition did not differ between exclusion and control plots in the thawing period and the growing season. Soil bacterial communities strongly varied across seasons, and the variations differed in specific groups. Both soil climatic factors (i.e., temperature and moisture) and soil biochemical variables partly accounted for the seasonal dynamics of bacterial communities. Taken together, our study indicates that soil bacterial communities in Tibetan forests are rather resilient to change in snow cover, at least at an intra-annual scale.

Keywords: Bacteria; Community composition; Community diversity; Illumina sequencing; Snow cover; Winter climate change.