Soil and bark biodiversity forms discrete islands between vineyards that are not affected by distance or management regime

Abstract

Within geographic regions, the existing data suggest that physical habitat (bark, soil, etc.) is the strongest factor determining agroecosystem microbial community assemblage, followed by geographic location (site), and then management regime (organic, conventional, etc.). The data also suggest community similarities decay with increasing geographic distance. However, integrated hypotheses for these observations have not been developed. We formalized and tested such hypotheses by sequencing 3.8 million bacterial 16S, fungal ITS2 and non-fungal eukaryotic COI barcodes deriving from 108 samples across two habitats (soil and bark) from six vineyards sites under conventional or conservation management. We found both habitat and site significantly affected community assemblage, with habitat the stronger for bacteria only, but there was no effect of management. There was no evidence for community similarity distance-decay within sites within each habitat. While communities significantly differed between vineyard sites, there was no evidence for between site community similarity distance-decay apart from bark bacterial communities, and no correlations with soil and bark pH apart from soil bacterial communities. Thus, within habitats, vineyard sites represent discrete biodiversity islands, and while bacterial, fungal and non-fungal eukaryotic biodiversity mostly differs between sites, the distance by which they are separated does not define how different they are.