Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 11, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20271-4
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Funding
- Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China [41530856]
- National Natural Scientific Fund for Excellent Young Scholars of China [41922048]
- National Key Research and Development Project [2016YFD0200309]
- Distinguished Youth Scholar Program of Jiangsu Province [BK20180049]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [41771297]
- Youth Innovation Promotion Association of CAS [2017361]
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Body size is a key life-history trait that influences community assembly by affecting how ecological processes operate at the organism level. However, the extent to which the relative influences of ecological processes mediate the assembly of differentially sized soil organisms is still unknown. Here, we investigate the community assembly of differentially sized soil microorganisms and microfauna using a continental-scale sampling effort combined with a global-scale meta-analysis. Our results reveal a general relationship between organism body size and the stochastic-deterministic balance operating on community assembly. The smallest microorganisms (bacteria) are relatively more influenced by dispersal-based stochastic processes, while larger ones (fungi, protists and nematodes) are more structured by selection-based deterministic processes. This study elucidates a significant and consistent relationship between an organism life-history trait and how distinct ecological processes operate in mediating their respective community assemblages, thus providing a better understanding of the mechanisms supporting soil biodiversity. It is unclear whether body size affects community assembly mechanisms of soil biota. Here, the authors analyse soil microbial and nematode communities sampled along a 4000-km transect in China and global soil microbiome data to show that bacterial assembly is governed by high dispersal, whereas larger taxa are more influenced by deterministic processes.
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