Effects of nitrogen addition and plant litter manipulation on soil fungal and bacterial communities in a semiarid sandy land

Jin Zhan; Yulin Li; Xueyong Zhao; Hongling Yang; Zhiying Ning; Rui Zhang

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2023.1013570

Effects of nitrogen addition and plant litter manipulation on soil fungal and bacterial communities in a semiarid sandy land

Front Microbiol. 2023 Mar 27:14:1013570. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2023.1013570. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Jin Zhan^{1

2}, Yulin Li¹, Xueyong Zhao¹, Hongling Yang^{1

2}, Zhiying Ning^{1

2}, Rui Zhang¹

Affiliations

¹ Naiman Desertification Research Station, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, China.
² College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Abstract

The plant and soil microbial communities are influenced by variability in environmental conditions (e.g., nitrogen addition); however, it is unclear how long-term nitrogen addition and litter manipulation affect soil microbial communities in a semiarid sandy grassland. Therefore, we simulated the impact of N addition and litter manipulation (litter removal, litter doubling) on plant and soil microbial communities in Horqin grassland, northern China through an experiment from 2014 to 2019. Our results revealed that in the case of non-nitrogen (N0), litter manipulation significantly reduced vegetation coverage (V) (p < 0.05); soil bacterial communities have higher alpha diversity than that of the fungi, and the beta diversity of soil fungi was higher than that of the bacteria; soil microbial alpha diversity was significantly decreased by nitrogen addition (N10) (p < 0.05); N addition and litter manipulation had significantly interactive influences on soil microbial beta diversity, and litter manipulation (C0 and C2) had significantly decreased soil microbial beta diversity (p < 0.05) in the case of nitrogen addition (N10) (p < 0.05). Moreover, bacteria were mostly dominated by the universal phyla Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Acidobacteria, and fungi were only dominated by Ascomycota. Furthermore, the correlation analysis, redundancy analysis (RDA), and variation partitioning analysis indicated that the soil fungi community was more apt to be influenced by plant community diversity. Our results provide evidence that plant and soil microbial community respond differently to the treatments of the 6-year N addition and litter manipulation in a semiarid sandy land.

Keywords: Horqin sandy land; litter manipulation; nitrogen addition; plant; soil microbial community.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Key Science and Technology Project of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (2021ZD001505 and 2019ZD00704), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32071845), and Class A Strategic Pilot Science and Technology Project of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA23060404).