Soil Microbial Networks Shift Across a High-Elevation Successional Gradient.

ABSTRACT: While it is well established that microbial composition and diversity shift along environmental gradients, how interactions among microbes change is poorly understood. Here, we tested how community structure and species interactions among diverse groups of soil microbes (bacteria, fungi, non-fungal eukaryotes) change across a fundamental ecological gradient, succession. Our study system is a high-elevation alpine ecosystem that exhibits variability in successional stage due to topography and harsh environmental conditions. We used hierarchical Bayesian joint distribution modeling to remove the influence of environmental covariates on species distributions and generated interaction networks using the residual species-to-species variance-covariance matrix. We hypothesized that as ecological

SUBMITTER: Farrer EC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6930148 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature