Soil microbial communities control soil biological processes and drive ecosystem functions; their abundances, richness, and composition are regarded as early indicators of changes in soil health and quality.
Measuring the abundances of microbial functional groups contributing to soil carbon and nitrogen processes could provide a rapid and sensitive approach for characterizing changes in soil functions. However, the contribution of these microbial functional groups to carbon and nitrogen decomposition in permafrost peatland soils remains unclear.
Dr. SONG Yanyu and Prof. SONG Changchun from the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences collected soils from 10 peatlands in sporadic island, discontinuous island, and continuous permafrost regions in Northeast China. The researchers revealed permafrost types affect soil bacteria, mcrA, pmoA amoA, nirK and nirS gene abundance distribution in peatlands. However, archaea are relatively stable in different permafrost peatlands. 42.5%, 15.9%, and 15.3% of the variation in soil microbial abundances could be explained by soil ammonia-N, pH, and total carbon, respectively. Soil pmoA, mcrA and nirS gene abundances were significantly positively correlated with soil TC and TN contents indicating that these three gene abundances can be used as soil TC and TN indicators.
The results shown analysis of carbon and nitrogen cycling microbial abundances in permafrost peatland soils offers an approach to directly link microbial groups to soil characteristics and ecosystem functions. Results of this study clearly reveal the predictable nature of soil microbial abundances, which can be used to conceptualize future studies on soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics in permafrost peatlands under climate change.
The study entitled "Microbial abundance as an indicator of soil carbon and nitrogen nutrient in permafrost peatlands" has been published online in Ecological Indicators.
This research was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
SONG Yanyu
Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
http://english.iga.cas.cn/
E-mail: songyanyu@iga.ac.cn
