Poster Presentation Australian Microbial Ecology 2022

Continental-scale mapping of soil bacteria and fungi compositional heterogeneity (#143)

Mercedes Roman Dobarco 1 , Alexandre M.J-C. Wadoux 1 , Peipei Xue 1
  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Soil microorganisms mediate a wide range of key processes and ecosystem services on which humans depend. In this study, we report on the biogeography and spatial pattern of soil biota for the Australian continent. We used as basis the DNA sequences from the Biome of Australia Soil Environments (BASE) which were collected over a range of different sites across Australia. We calculated the beta diversity of abundant taxa of soil bacteria and fungi, treating representative sequence data (OTUs) as individual taxa. Two ordination methods were applied to investigate the dissimilarities in microbial community composition, non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) and Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) for dimension reduction. The NMDS and UMAP used the weighted UniFrac distance for bacteria and Bray-Curtis dissimilarity for fungi on taxa relative abundance. The results of the NMDS for bacteria indicated that the structure of the data was captured fairly well, with a stress of 0.09. However, the stress of the fungi NMDS was 0.16, indicating that the fungi community composition was moderately well explained. We further collected a large set of environmental covariates that control the biogeography of soil biota, such as soil properties terrain attributes of vegetation indices, and of which maps are available. We fitted a quantile regression forest machine learning model to exploit the quantitative relationship between point-estimated values of beta diversity and environmental covariates, and used to model to predict beta diversity across Australia along with an estimate of uncertainty. We show that soil property and vegetation are the dominant controls of soil biota. The resulting maps also reveal the pattern of soil biota which can further be used for regional assessment of soil biodiversity and from which degradation induced by global changes can be monitored.