Distributional patterns of soil nematodes in relation to environmental variables in forest ecosystems

Highlights

•Relationships between environmental factors and nematode distributions at different spatial scales are assessed.

•Nematode diversity peaked in tropical forest ecosystem.

•Nematode diversity showed contrary patterns compared with their abundance.

•Factors most strongly affecting nematode communities changed across spatial scales.

Abstract

Understanding biodiversity and biogeographic distribution of soil fauna is an important topic in ecology. While nematode communities have been compared among ecosystems, knowledge remains limited about how environmental factors and nematode distributions are linked at different spatial scales. Here, we employed high-throughput sequencing to compare nematode communities in tropical (Xishuangbanna), subtropical (Ailaoshan), and cold temperate spruce-fir (Lijiang) forest ecosystems with identical spatial sampling. Relationships between nematode communities and environmental factors were analyzed using redundancy analysis (RDA). Our results showed that nematode richness and diversity peaked in Xishuangbanna; however, no significant differences were observed in other two forest ecosystems. Bacterial feeders and Omnivores / Carnivores (Om & Ca) had the lowest relative abundance, but the highest diversity, in Xishuangbanna, with the opposite pattern being detected for fungal and plant feeders. Our data also demonstrated that, for forest ecosystems, climate factors drive nematode communities distributions at the regional scale, while terrain and soil characteristics (including pH and nutrients) drive nematode communities distributions at local scales. This study improves our current understanding of key factors (environmental parameters) responsible for the biogeographical distribution of forest nematode communities at different spatial scales.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Nematode communities / Spatial scales / Driving factors / High-throughput sequencing forest ecosystems

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by South-east Asia Biodiversity Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y4ZK111B01), the CAS 135 program (2017XTBG-T01) and the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 2020JJ4564). We thank Xishuangbanna Station for Tropical Rainforest Ecosystem Studies the Ailaoshan forest ecosystem research stations of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Public Technology Service Center of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden for providing support and experimental facilities. We thank Dr. Sandhya Mishra for providing comments and language assistance to improve this manuscript. Finally, thank the anonymous reviewers who helped to improve this manuscript. We would like to thank Editage (www.editage.cn) for English language editing.

Data accessibility

The nematode SSU RNA gene sequences recovered in this study were deposited in the NCBI GenBank Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under accession number SRP074446.

Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s42832-020-0069-8 and is accessible for authorized users.

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