ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Molecular Biology and Ecology
Latitude-dependent diversity and assembly processes of coastal 1 microbial communities across multiple trophic levels in the China 2 Seas
Provisionally accepted
- 1National Marine Environmental Monitoring Center, Dalian, China
- 2Institute of Oceanology Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, China
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2 Abstract 13 Coastal sediment ecosystems function as dynamic interfaces for land-sea 14 interactions, harbouring highly complex microbial communities which support vital 15 ecological functions. However, the mechanisms governing microbial diversity 16 maintenance and cross-trophic community assembly at large spatial scales remain 17 poorly explored. In this study, a high-throughput sequencing approach was employed 18 to analyze the bacterial, fungal and protistan communities in surface sediments of the 19 China Seas. As indicated by higher values across most indices, bacterial communities 20 generally exhibited greater richness and diversity compared to fungal and protistan 21 communities. Beta diversity decomposition revealed that species turnover dominated 22 community variations across all three trophic levels, with the highest contribution in 23 bacteria. The neutral community model revealed that stochastic processes exerted a 24 stronger influence on bacterial assembly relative to fungi and protists. Moreover, null 25 model analyses demonstrated that bacterial communities were primarily structured by 26 dispersal limitation, fungal communities by ecological drift, while protistan 27 communities co-regulated by homogeneous selection and homogenising dispersal. 28 Furthermore, similar latitude-dependent patterns in the α-and β-diversity were 29 observed in bacteria and protists, yet such patterns were distinct for fungi. Finally, 30 based on the correlations between community variations with their assembly 31 mechanisms, regional species pools exerted the strongest influence on bacterial 32 β-diversity, whereas local assembly processes dominated fungal β-diversity. The 33 present study elucidates the trophic-level-dependent assembly rules of coastal 34 microbiomes, thereby establishing a mechanistic foundation for predicting ecosystem 35 responses to global change and informing evidence-based conservation of coastal 36 ecosystems.
Keywords: Bacteria, community assembly, diversity, Fungi, latitude pattern, Protists
Received: 27 Sep 2025; Accepted: 02 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Gao, Shao, Sun, Zhang, Li and Ye. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jinqing Ye
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