Spatial Structure of Soil Microbial Communities and the Evaluation of the Spatial Structure Analysis based on Relative Dissimilarity

Sanghoon Kang, Joon Jin Song

Abstract


The spatial structure of soil microbial communities was analyzed across the border of two distinctive grass vegetation patches. Genetic fingerprinting technique was used to assess microbial community structure in binary format data, which is not suitable for conventional semivariogram analysis. An alternative method of geostatistical analysis based on relative dissimilarity provided well fitted models from the experimental "semivariograms". Overall patterns of the models were fairly similar between bacterial and fungal communities, especially fittings (Indicative Goodness of Fit, IGF), sill (C1) and ranges (a) at comparable scales. A small difference was also noticeable in response to distinctive vegetation settings. The evaluation of the alternative spatial structure analysis was done by comparing the semivariogram and the dissimogram (semivariogram based on dissimilarity) using continuous variables (total soil nitrogen content and C/N ratio from same sampling design). The extremely high fit of the models and prevalent high nugget value from all the dissimograms might be the results of artificiality from using relative dissimilarity instead of semivariance. Thus, one should be careful when using this approach, especially in estimation purposes such as kriging, since prediction is dependent upon the parameters determined in dissimogram models.

Keywords


Soil Microbial Community; Geostatistics; Spatial Structure; Relative Dissimilarity; Dissimogram; Semivariogram

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