Soil pH and temperature regulate assembly processes of abundant and rare bacterial communities in agricultural ecosystems

The factors determining stochastic and deterministic processes that drive microbial community structure, specifically the balance of abundant and rare bacterial taxa, remain underexplored. Here we examined biogeographic patterns of abundant and rare bacterial taxa and explored environmental factors influencing their community assembly processes in agricultural fields across eastern China. More phylogenetic turnover correlating with spatial distance was observed in abundant than rare sub-communities. Homogeneous selection was the main assembly process for both the abundant and rare sub-communities; however, the abundant sub-community was more tightly clustered phylogenetically and was more sensitive to dispersal limitations than the rare sub-community. Rare sub-community of rice fields and abundant sub-community of maize fields were more governed by stochastic assembly processes, which showed higher operational taxonomic unit richness. We propose a conceptual paradigm wherein soil pH and mean annual temperature mediate the assembly of the abundant and rare sub-communities respectively. A higher soil pH leads to deterministic assembly of the abundant sub-community. For the rare sub-community, the dominance of stochasticity in low-temperature regions indicates weaker niche-based exclusion and the arrival of more evolutionary lineages. These findings suggest that the community assembly processes for abundant and rare bacterial taxa are dependent on distinct environmental variables in agro-ecosystems.