Ecological resilience, an important aspect of ecological stability, is the key indicator to understand the ability of an ecosystem to recover from environmental disturbances. Although amounts of ecological researches have focus on the resilience of community composition, the resilience of interactions within communities is often ignored, leading to oversimplification and overestimation of community resilience. Here, we conducted a microcosm experiment to show both resilience of composition and interaction in a soil microbial community after applying nutrient addition as a environmental disturbance. We used 16s rRNA sequencing to assess community compositional as well as interactional variation just before(DAT 30) and after(DAT 35, DAT 60) nutrient addition.
Results/Conclusions
We found that the community composition on DAT 60 showed no significant difference with that on DAT 30, while both of them changed sharply from DAT 35, consistent with the variation of soil nutrient conditions. However, the interaction within community on DAT 60 did not return to the original stage(DAT 30). These findings highlight the decoupling of resilience of community composition and interaction, and no single aspect of resilience was sufficient to reflect the overall resilience of the system.