Publication Date:
2022-10-27
Description:
© The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Fiore-Donno, A. M., Richter-Heitmann, T., Degrune, F., Dumack, K., Regan, K. M., Marhan, S., Boeddinghaus, R. S., Rillig, M. C., Friedrich, M. W., Kandeler, E., & Bonkowski, M. Functional traits and spatio-temporal structure of a major group of soil protists (Rhizaria: Cercozoa) in a temperate grassland. Frontiers in Microbiology, 10, (2019): 1332, doi:10.3389/fmicb.2019.01332.
Description:
Soil protists are increasingly appreciated as essential components of soil foodwebs; however, there is a dearth of information on the factors structuring their communities. Here we investigate the importance of different biotic and abiotic factors as key drivers of spatial and seasonal distribution of protistan communities. We conducted an intensive survey of a 10 m2 grassland plot in Germany, focusing on a major group of protists, the Cercozoa. From 177 soil samples, collected from April to November, we obtained 694 Operational Taxonomy Units representing 〉6 million Illumina reads. All major cercozoan taxonomic and functional groups were present, dominated by the small flagellates of the Glissomonadida. We found evidence of environmental selection structuring the cercozoan communities both spatially and seasonally. Spatial analyses indicated that communities were correlated within a range of 3.5 m. Seasonal variations in the abundance of bacterivores and bacteria, followed by that of omnivores suggested a dynamic prey-predator succession. The most influential edaphic properties were moisture and clay content, which differentially affected each functional group. Our study is based on an intense sampling of protists at a small scale, thus providing a detailed description of the biodiversity of different taxa/functional groups and the ecological processes involved in shaping their distribution.
Description:
This work was partly supported by the DFG Priority Program 1374 “Infrastructure-Biodiversity-Exploratories.” Funding to AMF-D and MB was provided by BO 1907/18-1; funding to EK, SM, KMR, and RSB was provided by KA 1590/8-2 and KA 1590/8-3; funding to FD and MCR was provided by the BiodivERsA grant “Digging Deeper.” We are grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation Grant 316030 150817 for funding the MiSeq instrument at the University of Geneva (CH).
Keywords:
Biogeography
;
Functional traits
;
Soil ecology
;
Protozoa
;
Microbial assembly
;
Environmental selection
;
Dispersal limitation
;
Soil protists
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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