Biotic interactions outweigh abiotic factors as drivers of bark microbial communities in central European forests

Bark surfaces are extensive areas within forest ecosystems, that provide an ideal habitat for microbial communities, through their longevity and seasonal stability. Here we provide a comprehensive account of the bark surface microbiome of living trees in Central European forests, and identify drivers of diversity and community composition. We examine algal, fungal and bacterial communities and their interactions using metabarcoding on samples from over 750 trees collected in the Biodiversity Exploratories in northern, central and southern Germany. We show that mutual biotic influence is more important than the abiotic environment with regard to community composition, whereas abiotic conditions and geography are more important for alpha diversity. Important abiotic factors are the relative humidity and light availability, which decrease the algal and bacterial alpha diversity, but strongly increase fungal alpha diversity. In addition, temperature is important in shaping the microbial community, with higher temperature leading to homogeneous communities of dominant fungi, but high turnover in bacterial communities. Changes in the community dissimilarity of one organismal group occurs in close relation to changes in the other two, suggesting that there are close interactions between the three major groups of the bark surface microbial communities, which may be linked to beneficial exchange. To understand the functioning of the forest microbiome as a whole, we need to further investigate the functionality of interactions within the bark surface microbiome and combine these results with findings from other forest habitats such as soil or canopy.