Climate change and human activities altered the diversity and composition of soil microbial community in alpine grasslands of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.
Alpine ecosystems are known to be sensitive to climate change and human disturbances. However, the knowledge about the changes of their underground microbial communities is inadequate. We explored the diversity and structure of soil bacterial and fungal communities using Ilumina MiSeq sequencing in native alpine grasslands (i.e. the alpine meadow, alpine steppe) and cultivated grassland of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) under three-year treatments of overgrazing, warming and enhanced rainfall. Enhanced rainfall rather than warming significantly reduced soil microbial diversity in native alpine grasslands. Variable warming significantly reduced it in the cultivated grassland. Over 20% and 40% variations of microbial diversity could be explained by soil nutrients and moisture in the alpine meadow and cultivated grassland, separately. Soil microbial communities could be clustered into different groups according to different treatments in the alpine meadow and cultivated grassland. For the alpine steppe, with the lowest soil nutrients and moistures, <10% variations of microbial diversity was explained by soil properties; and the soil microbial communities among different treatments were similar. The soil microbial community in the cultivated grassland was varied from it in native grasslands. Over 50% variations of soil microbial communities among different treatments were explained by soil nutrients and moisture in each grassland type. Our results suggest that climate change and human activities strongly affected soil microbial communities by changing soil nutrients and moistures in alpine grassland ecosystems.
State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
Yong
Y
Zhang
State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China; Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3001, USA. Electronic address: dongshikui@sina.com.
Shikui
S
Dong
Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development in Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China. Electronic address: gaoqzh@ami.ac.cn.
Qingzhu
Q
Gao
State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
Shiliang
S
Liu
Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of Science, Xining 810008, China.
Huakun
H
Zhou
Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development in Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China.
Hasbagan
H
Ganjurjav
Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development in Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China.
Xuexia
X
Wang
D044822:Biodiversity; D057231:Climate Change; D004784:Environmental Monitoring; D065948:Grassland; D012987:Soil / Q000737:chemistry; D012988:Soil Microbiology; D018609:Tibet
D012987:Soil
Bacteria; Climate change; Fungi; Grass cultivation; Overgrazing; Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau