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.