ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Terrestrial Microbiology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1640134
This article is part of the Research TopicPlant Mineral Microbe Interactions, Vol IIView all 4 articles
Land use change has profoundly altered the process of bacterial community assembly in the northeastern black soil zone
Provisionally accepted
- Heilongjiang University, Harbin, China
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Soil microorganisms play a critical role in maintaining ecological functions, yet their responses to grassland reclamation and tillage are poorly understood. This study focuses on the Northeast China Black Soil Region, utilizing high-throughput sequencing to compare soil bacterial community characteristics between undisturbed grasslands (CK) and reclaimed croplands (F). The analysis assessed structural changes and shifts in ecological strategies of soil bacterial communities under different land-use types. The results revealed that, compared to pristine grasslands, croplands exhibited higher soil pH and elevated concentrations of several nutrients, including ammonium nitrogen, nitrate nitrogen, and total phosphorus. The Average Variation Degree (AVD) indicated greater compositional stability of the bacterial community in cropland soils. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of dominant bacterial genera showed that Sphingomonas and Pseudarthrobacter were more prevalent in croplands than grasslands. Random forest classification modeling revealed that several rare bacterial genera, including Rhodomicrobium, Amycolatopsis, and Clostridium, though each less than 1% of the community, played disproportionately critical roles in shaping microbial community structure. Co-occurrence network analysis showed that reclamation weakened interspecies interactions and significantly reduced network complexity, connectivity, and cohesion (P< 0.05). Neutral community assembly modeling further indicated that stochastic processes played a more dominant role in bacterial community assembly in croplands compared to pristine grasslands. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of how grassland reclamation and tillage influence soil bacterial communities in the Songnen Plain black soil region. These findings advance our ecological understanding of land use change and offer insights for managing black soil resources and ecosystems sustainably.
Keywords: Land reclamation, Black soil area, soil bacteria, community structure, Co mmunity assembly
Received: 04 Jun 2025; Accepted: 06 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sun, Zhao, Liu, Song, Zhang and Song. 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: Fuqiang Song, Heilongjiang University, Harbin, China
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