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Precipitation Drives Soil Protist Diversity and Community Structure in Dry Grasslands

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Abstract

Protists are essential components of soil microbial communities, mediating nutrient cycling and ecosystem functions in terrestrial ecosystems. However, their distribution patterns and driving factors, particularly, the relative importance of climate, plant and soil factors, remain largely unknown. This limits our understanding of soil protist roles in ecosystem functions and their responses to climate change. This is particularly a concern in dryland ecosystems where soil microbiomes are more important for ecosystem functions because plant diversity and growth are heavily constrained by environmental stresses. Here, we explored protist diversity and their driving factors in grassland soils on the Tibetan Plateau, which is a typical dryland region with yearly low temperatures. Soil protist diversity significantly decreased along the gradient of meadow, steppe, and desert. Soil protist diversity positively correlated with precipitation, plant biomass and soil nutrients, but these correlations were changed by grazing. Structural equation and random forest models demonstrated that precipitation dominated soil protist diversity directly and indirectly by influencing plant and soil factors. Soil protist community structure gradually shifted along meadow, steppe and desert, and was driven more by precipitation than by plant and soil factors. Soil protist community compositions were dominated by Cercozoa, Ciliophora and Chlorophyta. In particular, Ciliophora increased but Chlorophyta decreased in relative abundance along the gradient of meadow, steppe and desert. These results demonstrate that precipitation plays more important roles in driving soil protist diversity and community structure than plant and soil factors, suggesting that future precipitation change profoundly alters soil protist community and functions in dry grasslands.

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Data Availability

The raw sequencing reads generated have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena) under project ID PRJNA895936.

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Funding

This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [32161123004 and 42177101] and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China [2022YFE0114000].  

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Environmental Pollution Control and Waste Resource Recycle, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, 010021, China

    Jin Zhao & Wei Guo

  2. State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System and Resources Environment, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, 100101, China

    Jin Zhao, Dandan Fan, Xuliang Zhuang & Weidong Kong

  3. College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100039, China

    Dandan Fan, Xuliang Zhuang & Weidong Kong

  4. Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development in Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, 100081, China

    Jianshuang Wu

  5. Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modeling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Xianzhou Zhang

Authors
  1. Jin Zhao
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  2. Dandan Fan
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  3. Wei Guo
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  4. Jianshuang Wu
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  5. Xianzhou Zhang
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  6. Xuliang Zhuang
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  7. Weidong Kong
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Contributions

WK conceived this study and JZ performed the data analysis and created the figures. JZ and WK wrote the manuscript with extensive discussions from the rest of authors. All authors contributed to the revisions with the approval of the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Weidong Kong.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Zhao, J., Fan, D., Guo, W. et al. Precipitation Drives Soil Protist Diversity and Community Structure in Dry Grasslands. Microb Ecol 86, 2293–2304 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-023-02235-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-023-02235-5

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