Abstract
Prescribed burn is a management tool that influences the physical structure and composition of forest plant communities and their associated microorganisms. Plant-associated microorganisms aid in host plant disease tolerance and increase nutrient availability. The effects of prescribed burn on microorganisms associated with native ecologically and economically important tree species, such as Cornus florida L. (flowering dogwood), are not well understood, particularly in aboveground plant tissues (e.g., leaf, stem, and bark tissues). The objective of this study was to use 16S rRNA gene and ITS2 region sequencing to evaluate changes in bacterial and fungal communities of five different flowering dogwood-associated niches (soil, roots, bark, stem, and leaves) five months following a prescribed burn treatment. The alpha- and beta-diversity of root bacterial/archaeal communities differed significantly between prescribed burn and unburned control-treated trees. In these bacterial/archaeal root communities, we also detected a significantly higher relative abundance of sequences identified as Acidothermaceae, a family of thermophilic bacteria. No significant differences were detected between prescribed burn-treated and unburned control trees in bulk soils or bark, stem, or leaf tissues. The findings of our study suggest that prescribed burn does not significantly alter the aboveground plant-associated microbial communities of flowering dogwood trees five months following the prescribed burn application. Further studies are required to better understand the short- and long-term effects of prescribed burns on the microbial communities of forest trees.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | 15822 |
Journal | PeerJ |
Volume | 11 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2023 |
Funding
This work was supported by the USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA; Hatch project 1009630: TEN00495), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA; Grant 58-6062-0022), and the University of Tennessee, Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology. Melissa Cregger’s contribution to this work was supported by the Genomic Science Program, United States Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research, as part of the Plant Microbe Interfaces Scientific Focus Area at ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the United States Department of Energy under contract DEAC05-00OR22725. Support for Ph.D. candidate Aaron Onufrak was provided by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture AFRI Pre-Doctoral Fellowship (Grant Number: 2022-67011-36578). There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Keywords
- 16S rRNA
- Cornus florida
- Flowering dogwood
- Internal transcribed spacer (ITS)
- Microbial communities
- Microbiome
- Native trees
- Phytobiome
- Plant–microbe interactions
- Prescribed fire