Contrasting Effects of Local Environmental and Biogeographic Factors on the Composition and Structure of Bacterial Communities in Arid Monospecific Mangrove Soils
Timothy Thomson, Marco Fusi, Morgan F. Bennett-Smith, Natalie Prinz, Eva Aylagas, Susana Carvalho, Catherine E. Lovelock, Burton H. Jones, Joanne I. Ellis
Abstract
Mangrove ecosystems are increasingly being recognized for their potential to sequester atmospheric carbon, thereby mitigating the effects of anthropogenically driven greenhouse gas emissions. The bacterial community in the soils plays an important role in the breakdown and recycling of carbon and other nutrients. To assess and predict changes in carbon storage, it is important to understand how the bacterial community is shaped by its environment. Here, we compared the bacterial communities of mangrove forests on different spatial scales, from local within-forest to biogeographic comparisons. The bacterial community composition differed more between distinct intertidal zones of the same forest than between forests in distant geographic regions. The calculated network structure of theoretically interacting bacteria, however, differed most between the geographic regions. Our findings highlight the importance of local environmental factors in shaping the microbial soil community in mangroves and highlight a disconnect between community composition and structure in microbial soil assemblages.