2.3 Variation in bacterial community diversity and composition
across grassland degradation gradients
Significant differences in soil variables and microbial alpha-diversity
were calculated using one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) in IBM SPSS
Statistics 23.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA). The principal co-ordinates
analysis (PCoA) and permutational
multivariate ANOVA (PERMANOVA) analysis were conducted to analyze
differences in microbial composition using the ‘vegan’ and
‘pairwiseAdonis’ packages in R 4.0.4 (R Core Team, Vienna, Austria). The
Mantel test was carried out to determine the correlation between
environmental variables and community composition using the ‘vegan’
package in R 4.0.4 (R Core Team), and the unique OTUs in each community
were visualized using the ‘UpSetR’ package in R 4.0.4 (R Core Team).
Furthermore, the ‘DESeq2’ and ‘ggplot2’ packages in R 4.0.4 (R Core
Team) were used for the identification of OTUs with significant
differences and visualization of the data, respectively.