DIFFERENCES IN THE MICROBIAL POPULATION ASSOCIATED WITH THREE WETLAND TYPES IN THE SANJIANG PLAIN, NORTHEAST CHINA

The Sanjiang Plain is the largest freshwater wetland area in Northeast China and plays an important role in regulating climate stability for this region. However, agricultural activity has decreased wetland coverage with about 84 % since the1950s. This has resulted in lowered water tables and degraded wetlands, with dryer marsh meadows and dry meadow coverage replacing wet marshlands. Here, we report investigations towards the soil microbial community composition and diversity in the different degeneration wetlands types. Bacterial and fungal communities in the soil types were compared using high resolution bar-coded pyrosequencing technology. The results revealed that the bacterial and fungal diversity was lower in wet marshland than in drier marsh meadow and dry meadows. The distribution of sequence reads into different bacterial and fungal phyla further differed between the soil samples. The wet marsh soil displayed a higher abundance of Proteobacteria but lower abundance of Acidobacteria, while the higher abundance of unclassified fungi but smaller fractions of Ascomycota and Basidiomycota than the other soil types. The results reported here demonstrate that soil bacterial and fungal communities change as a result of differences in the soil environment in the Sanjiang Plain.