A biogeographic map of soil bacterial communities in wheats field of the North China Plain

Abstract

The vast diversity of soil bacteria provides essential ecosystem services that support agricultural production. Variation in the diversity and composition of soil biota may have predictive values for soil nutrient cycling and resilience of ecosystem services, thus providing valuable insights to improve food production. The North China Plain (NCP) is one of the world’s key agricultural regions, supplying more than 50% of the cereal consumed in Asia. However, it is unknown whether soil microbial diversity is predictable across the NCP. Using the MiSeq Illumina platform, we examined bacterial community variation in relation to spatial and environmental factors from 243 soils in wheat-maize double cropping rotation fields across the NCP, which cover nearly 0.3 million KM². Based on observed bacterial communities and their relationships with environmental factors, we generated a map of bacterial communities across the NCP. The highest bacterial diversity was found in the middle part of the NCP, with most of the variation in diversity attributable to differences in the community similarity of Actinobacteria and Alphaproteobacteria. These findings provide important baseline information for analyzing the relationships between microbial community, soil functionality and crop yields.

Keywords

predicting map / bacteria diversity / Actinobacteria / Alphaproteobacteria

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Acknowledgments

We thank Ruibo Sun, Xingjia Xiang, Dan He, Kaoping Zhang, Yingying Ni, Teng Yang, Hongfei Wang and Kunkun Fan for their assistance in soil sampling and laboratory analyses. This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program (XDB15010101) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFD0200604, 2017YFC0803803), the “135” Plan and Frontiers Projects of Institute of Soil Science (ISSASIP1641), The collaborative innovation project from the Forensic Appraisal Center of The ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China (2016XTCX02), and the China Biodiversity Observation Networks (Sino BON).

Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s42832-019-0014-x and is accessible for authorized users.

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