Lingyue Zhu, Lu Luan, Yan Chen, Xiaoyue Wang, Shungui Zhou, Wenxiu Zou, Xiaori Han, Yinghua Duan, Bo Zhu, Yan Li, Wenzhao Liu, Jizhong Zhou, Jiabao Zhang, Yuji Jiang, Bo Sun
Unraveling the influence of community assembly processes on soil ecosystem functioning presents a major challenge in the field of theoretical ecology, as it has received limited attention. Here, we used a series of long-term experiments spanning over 25 years to explore the assembly processes of bacterial, fungal, protist, and nematode communities using high-throughput sequencing. We characterized the soil microbial functional potential by the abundance of microbial genes associated with carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur cycling using GeoChip-based functional gene profiling, and determined how the assembly processes of organism groups regulate soil microbial functional potential through community diversity and network stability...
February 2024: Global Change Biology