Shifts in bacterial community structure during succession in a glacier foreland of the High Arctic

Abstract

Primary succession after glacier retreat has been widely studied in plant communities, but bacterial succession is still poorly understood. In particular, few studies of microbial succession have been performed in the Arctic. We investigated the shifts in bacterial community structure and soil physicochemical properties along a successional gradient in a 100-year glacier foreland of the High Arctic. Multivariate analyses revealed that time after glacier retreat played a key role in associated bacterial community structure during succession. However, environmental filtering (i.e. pH and soil temperature) also accounted for a different, but substantial, proportion of the bacterial community structure. Using the functional trait-based approach, we found that average rRNA operon (rrn) copy number of bacterial communities is high in earlier successional stages and decreased over time. This suggests that soil bacterial taxa with higher rrn copy number have a selective advantage in early successional stages due to their ability of rapidly responding to nutrient inputs in newly exposed soils after glacier retreat. Taken together, our results demonstrate that both deglaciation time and environmental filters play key roles in structuring bacterial communities and soil bacterial groups with different ecological strategies occur in different stages of succession in this glacier foreland.

Keywords: functional traits; glacier retreat; microbial succession; soil bacterial community.