Soil Rehabilitation Promotes Resilient Microbiome with Enriched Keystone Taxa than Agricultural Infestation in Barren Soils on the Loess Plateau
Dong Liu,
Parag Bhople,
Katharina Maria Keiblinger,
Baorong Wang,
Shaoshan An,
Nan Yang,
Caspar C. C. Chater,
Fuqiang Yu
Affiliations
Dong Liu
State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Water Resources, Northwest A&F University, Xianyang 712100, China
Parag Bhople
Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Limerick, V94 T9PX Limerick, Ireland
Katharina Maria Keiblinger
Department of Forest and Soil Sciences, Institute of Soil Research, University of Natural Resources and Life-Sciences, 1190 Vienna, Austria
Baorong Wang
State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Water Resources, Northwest A&F University, Xianyang 712100, China
Shaoshan An
State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Water Resources, Northwest A&F University, Xianyang 712100, China
Nan Yang
College of Biology and the Environment, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing 210037, China
Caspar C. C. Chater
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond TW9 3AE, UK
Fuqiang Yu
The Germplasm Bank of Wild Species, Yunnan Key Laboratory for Fungal Diversity and Green Development, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming 650201, China
Drylands provide crucial ecosystem and economic services across the globe. In barren drylands, keystone taxa drive microbial structure and functioning in soil environments. In the current study, the Chinese Loess plateau’s agricultural (AL) and twenty-year-old rehabilitated lands (RL) provided a unique opportunity to investigate land-use-mediated effects on barren soil keystone bacterial and fungal taxa. Therefore, soils from eighteen sites were collected for metagenomic sequencing of bacteria specific 16S rRNA and fungi specific ITS2 regions, respectively, and to conduct molecular ecological networks and construct microbial OTU-based correlation matrices. In RL soils we found a more complex bacterial network represented by a higher number of nodes and links, with a link percentage of 77%, and a lower number of nodes and links for OTU-based fungal networks compared to the AL soils. A higher number of keystone taxa was observed in the RL (66) than in the AL (49) soils, and microbial network connectivity was positively influenced by soil total nitrogen and microbial biomass carbon contents. Our results indicate that plant restoration and the reduced human interventions in RL soils could guide the development of a better-connected microbial network and ensure sufficient nutrient circulation in barren soils on the Loess plateau.
