Anthropogenic Pollution Intervenes the Recovery Processes of Soil Archaeal Community Composition and Diversity From Flooding

Archaea play vital roles in global biogeochemical cycles, particularly in nitrification and methanogenesis. The recovery of archaeal community following disturbance is essential for maintaining the stability of ecosystem function. To examine whether the archaeal community could recover from water flooding and assess the influence of anthropogenic pollution on the autogenic recovery, soil samples from two riparian zones with contrasting pollution background were investigated. Collected samples in each area were divided into three groups of reference, flooding, and recovery according to the flooded state of each site. The results showed that the archaeal abundance was resilient to the disturbances of both water flooding and anthropogenic pollution. More similar community composition and diversity appeared between the recovery and reference groups in the area with low anthropogenic pollution. It indicated that high anthropogenic pollution could result in less resilience of archaeal community. The co-occurrence network further revealed that the archaeal community in the area of low anthropogenic pollution exhibited more associations suggesting a higher ecosystem stability. The better recovery of archaeal community was associated with the high resilience ability. The Nitrososphaerales was the key taxon maintaining the better recovery of the archaeal community from the disturbances due to its high resilience index and quantitative dominance. Overall, archaeal community has the capability of autogenic recovery, the process of which might be intervened by anthropogenic pollution, and then potentially affects the ecosystem functions of the riparian system.