Trophic interactions regulate microbial responses to environmental conditions and partially counteract nitrogen transformation potential in urban river bends

Abstract

River bends are distinguished by high biodiversity and elevated rates of biogeochemical activities due to complex hydromorphological processes that form diverse geomorphic units, making it challenging to elucidate the impact of trophic interactions on community assembly and biogeochemical processes. Here, we clarify the effect of trophic interactions in determining the assembly of multi-trophic microbial communities and the impact on nitrogen transformation potential by distinguishing the direct and cascading effects of environmental conditions based on 32 samples collected from a typical urban river bends. It was found that both bacterial and micro-eukaryotic communities were determined by homogeneous selection (indicated by β-nearest taxon index, accounted for 85% and 48.3%, respectively), whereas the dominant environmental factors were different, being sediment particle size (P < 0.05) and nitrogen (P < 0.05), respectively. Both the microbial co-occurrence network and the significant association (P < 0.05) between β-nearest taxon index and trophic transfer efficiency changes showed that the trophic interactions strongly shaped microbial communities in the urban river bends. The path modeling suggested that environmental conditions resulted in an increase in abundance of multi-trophic microbial communities via direct effects (mean standardized effects = 0.21), but reductions in abundance of bacteria via cascading effects, i.e., trophic interaction (mean standardized effects = -0.1). When considering direct and cascading effects together, environmental conditions in urban river bends were found to enhance the abundance of microbial communities, with decreasing magnitude at the higher trophic level. Analogously, the path modeling also indicated the nitrogen transformation potential enhanced by environmental conditions via direct effects, but partly counteracted by trophic interactions via cascading effects. The obtained results could provide a theoretical basis for the regulation and restoration of urban rivers.

Keywords: Environmental conditions; Multi-trophic levels; Nitrogen transformation potential; Trophic interaction; Urban river bends.