Seasonal succession of microbial community co-occurrence patterns and community assembly mechanism in coal mining subsidence lakes

Wangkai Fang; Tingyu Fan; Liangji Xu; Shun Wang; Xingming Wang; Akang Lu; Yongchun Chen

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2023.1098236

Seasonal succession of microbial community co-occurrence patterns and community assembly mechanism in coal mining subsidence lakes

Front Microbiol. 2023 Feb 3:14:1098236. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2023.1098236. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Wangkai Fang^{1

2}, Tingyu Fan^{1

2}, Liangji Xu^{1

2}, Shun Wang^{1

2}, Xingming Wang^{1

2}, Akang Lu^{1

2}, Yongchun Chen³

Affiliations

¹ School of Earth and Environment, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, China.
² Anhui Engineering Laboratory for Comprehensive Utilization of Water and Soil Resources and Ecological Protection in Mining Area With High Groundwater Level, Huainan, China.
³ National Engineering Laboratory of Coal Mine Ecological Environment Protection, Huainan, China.

Abstract

Coal mining subsidence lakes are classic hydrologic characteristics created by underground coal mining and represent severe anthropogenic disturbances and environmental challenges. However, the assembly mechanisms and diversity of microbial communities shaped by such environments are poorly understood yet. In this study, we explored aquatic bacterial community diversity and ecological assembly processes in subsidence lakes during winter and summer using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. We observed that clear bacterial community structure was driven by seasonality more than by habitat, and the α-diversity and functional diversity of the bacterial community in summer were significantly higher than in winter (p < 0.001). Canonical correspondence analysis indicated that temperature and chlorophyll-a were the most crucial contributing factors influencing the community season variations in subsidence lakes. Specifically, temperature and chlorophyll-a explained 18.26 and 14.69% of the community season variation, respectively. The bacterial community variation was driven by deterministic processes in winter but dominated by stochastic processes in summer. Compared to winter, the network of bacterial communities in summer exhibited a higher average degree, modularity, and keystone taxa (hubs and connectors in a network), thereby forming a highly complex and stable community structure. These results illustrate the clear season heterogeneity of bacterial communities in subsidence lakes and provide new insights into revealing the effects of seasonal succession on microbial assembly processes in coal mining subsidence lake ecosystems.

Keywords: bacterial community diversity; co-occurrence network; community assembly; keystone species; seasonal succession; subsidence lake.