土壤微生物群落构建理论与时空演变特征

土壤微生物作为陆地生态系统的重要组成部分,直接或间接地参与几乎所有的土壤生态过程,在物质循环、能量转换以及污染物降解等过程中都发挥着重要作用。对土壤微生物时空演变规律及其形成机制的研究,不仅是微生物演变和进化的基础科学问题,也是预测微生物及其所介导的生态功能对环境条件变化响应、适应和反馈的理论依据。讨论了土壤微生物群落的定义、测度方法和指标,认为群落是联系动植物宏观生态学与微生物生态学的基础,群落构建机制是宏观和微观生态学都需要研究的核心科学问题;从生态学的群落构建理论出发,阐述了包括生态位理论/中性理论、过程理论和多样性-稳定性理论在土壤微生物时空演变研究中的应用,以及微生物群落在时间和空间上的分布特征及其尺度效应;确立了以微生物群落构建理论为基础、不同时空尺度下土壤微生物群落演变特征为主要内容的微生物演变研究的基本框架。

Mechanisms of community organization and spatiotemporal patterns of soil microbial communities

As an important component of terrestrial ecosystems, soil microbial communities are directly or indirectly involved in almost all soil ecological processes, including material cycles, energy conversion, and pollutant transformation. Studies of the spatiotemporal patterns of changes in soil microbial communities and the underlying mechanisms would help us determine the basic principle of microbial evolution, and would provide a scientific basis to predict the response, adaptation, and feedback of the microbial communities to environmental changes. In this review, we discuss the definition, analysis methods, and indices of soil microbial community. We argue that community could be the basic unit in macro-ecology and microbial ecology. Studies of community organization mechanisms are at the core of both the macro- and microbial ecology. Based on the community organization theories in ecology, ecological niche and neutral theories, process-based theories, and diversity-stability theories were introduced and applied to understand the soil microbial spatiotemporal patterns and the scale effects. A framework for the study of spatiotemporal patterns of changes in soil microbial communities was proposed based on the community organization theories under different spatial and temporal scales.