Continental-scale plant invasions reshuffle the soil microbiome of blue carbon ecosystems

16 páginas.- 7 figuras.- 62 referencias.- The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19534285.v4 .- Additional supporting information may be found in the online version of the article at the publisher’s website.

Theory and experiments support that plant invasions largely impact aboveground biodiversity and function. Yet, much less is known on the influence of plant invasions on the structure and function of the soil microbiome of coastal wetlands, one of the largest major reservoirs of biodiversity and carbon on Earth. We studied the continental-scale invasion of Spartina alterniflora across 2451 km of Chinese coastlines as our model-system and found that S. alterniflora invasion can largely influence the soil microbiome (across six depths from 0 to 100 cm), compared with the most common microhabitat found before invasion (mudflats, Mud). In detail, S. alterniflora invasion was not only positively associated with bacterial richness but also resulted in important biotic homogenization of bacterial communities, suggesting that plant invasion can lead to important continental scale trade-offs in the soil microbiome. We found that plant invasion changed the community composition of soil bacterial communities across the soil profile. Moreover, the bacterial communities associated with S. alterniflora invasions where less responsive to climatic changes than those in native Mud microhabitats, suggesting that these new microbial communities might become more dominant under climate change. Plant invasion also resulted in important reductions in the complexity and stability of microbial networks, decoupling the associations between microbes and carbon pools. Taken together, our results indicated that plant invasions can largely influence the microbiome of coastal wetlands at the scale of China, representing the first continental-scale example on how plant invasions can reshuffle the soil microbiome, with consequences for the myriad of functions that they support.

Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) and the Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades of the Junta de Andalucía, Grant/Award Number: P20_00879; Jiangsu Planned Projects for Postdoctoral Research Funds, Grant/Award Number: 2019Z394; National Key Research and Development Program of China, Grant/Award Number: 2017YFC0506102; National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Number: 41907040 and 91951109; Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Grant/Award Number: PID2020-115813RA-I00

Peer reviewed