Spatiotemporal evolution and assembly processes of ammonia-oxidizing prokaryotic communities in 1 000-year-old coastal reclaimed soils

Coastal marshes are transitional areas between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. They are sensitive to climate change and anthropogenic activities. In recent decades, the reclamation of coastal marshes has greatly increased, and its effects on microbial communities in coastal marshes have been studied with great interest. Most of these studies have explained the short-term spatiotemporal variation in soil microbial community dynamics. However, the impact of reclamation on the community composition and assembly processes of functional microbes (e.g., ammonia-oxidizing prokaryotes) is often ignored. In this study, using quantitative polymerase chain reaction and the Ion S5™ XL sequencing platform, we investigated the spatiotemporal dynamics, assembly processes, and diversity patterns of ammonia-oxidizing prokaryotes in 1 000-year-old reclaimed coastal salt marshes. The taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity and composition of ammonia oxidizers showed apparent spatiotemporal variations with soil reclamation. Phylogenetic null modelling-based analysis showed that across all sites, the archaeal ammonia-oxidizing community was assembled by a deterministic process (84.71%), and deterministic processes were also dominant (55.2%) for ammonia-oxidizing bacterial communities except for communities at 60 years of reclamation. The assembly process and nitrification activity in reclaimed soils were positively correlated. The abundance of the amoA gene and changes in ammonia-oxidizing archaeal and bacterial diversities significantly affected the nitrification activity in reclaimed soils. These findings suggest that long-term coastal salt marsh reclamation affects nitrification by modulating the activities of ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms and regulating their community structures and assembly processes. These results provide a better understanding of the effects of long-term land reclamation on soil nitrogen-cycling microbial communities.