Bacterial biogeography in China and its association to land use and soil organic carbon

Highlights

	● 6102 high-quality sequencing results of soil bacterial samples were re-analyzed.
	● The type of land use was the principal driver of bacterial richness and diversity.
	● SOC content is positively correlated with key bacteria and total nitrogen content.

Abstract

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is the largest pool of carbon in terrestrial ecosystems and plays a crucial role in regulating atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. Identifying the essential relationship between soil bacterial communities and SOC concentration is complicated because of many factors, one of which is geography. We systematically re-analyzed 6102 high-quality bacterial samples in China to delineate the bacterial biogeographic distribution of bacterial communities and identify key species associated with SOC concentration at the continental scale. The type of land use was the principal driver of bacterial richness and diversity, and we used machine learning to calculate its influence on microbial composition and their co-occurrence relationship with SOC concentration. Cultivated land was much more complex than forest, grassland, wetland and wasteland, with high SOC concentrations tending to enrich bacteria such as Rubrobacter, Terrimonas and Sphingomona. SOC concentration was positively correlated with the amounts of soil total nitrogen and key bacteria Xanthobacteraceae, Streptomyces and Acidobacteria but was negatively correlated with soil pH, total phosphorus and Micrococcaceae. Our study combined the SOC pool with bacteria and indicated that specific bacteria may be key factors affecting SOC concentration, forcing us to think about microbial communities associated with climate change in a new way.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

biogeography / soil organic carbon / land-use type / machine learning

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Data availability

All raw data used in this study are available in NCBI RefSeq database. Bioproject numbers of all samples are provided in Table S1.

Acknowledgments

We appreciate Liu et al. for their latest data (Liu et al., 2020a, 2020b, 2022) on national SOC, pH, as well as the contents of total nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Funding was provided by the Key R&D Program of Zhejiang Province (2022C02046 and 2022C02029), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21976161 and 21777145). J.P. acknowledges funding from the Spanish Government grant PID2019-110521GB-I00, the Fundación Ramón Areces grant CIVP20A6621, and the Catalan Government grant SGR2017-1005.

Author contributions

The contribution of our research article is: Haifeng Qian, Yong-Guan Zhu, and Ning-Yi Zhou conceived the study; Chaotang Lei, Qi Zhang, Zhenyan Zhang and Liwei Sun collected the data; Nuohan Xu and Tao Lu analyzed the data; Tao Lu, Nuohan Xu, Feng He, Josep Peñuelas and Haifeng Qian wrote the manuscript.

Ethics declarations

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s42832-023-0172-8 and is accessible for authorized users.

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