Sharp contrast in the bacterial community assemblages of Arctic Midtree Lovenbreen glacier foreland ecosystems

Polar regions provide an ideal environmental setting to investigate the succession of bacterial communities. Especially, Arctic terrestrial ecosystems are constantly undergoing rapid changes due to global warming, resulting in the increase of average Arctic temperatures twice the global average for the past 50 years. When a glacier is retreating, new landscapes are exposed that have been previously locked under the ice for thousands of years, providing an opportunity for colonization and succession process of various lifeforms in time and space. In glacier foreland ecosystems, microbes play an important role in modulating the vegetation structure during the colonization, whilst plants influence and recruit their own symbiotic communities through rhizosphere, which in turn participate in biogeochemical processes in the high latitude regions. In the present study, we investigated the bacterial community structure of Midtree Lovenbreen glacier foreland ecosystem using chrono sequence approach. Samples were collected from the glacier foreland associated with Midtre Lovenbreen glacier, Svalbard during the year of 2019 Indian Arctic expedition . A total of 8 soil samples were collected on a transect by using Chronosequence approach from glacier snout to fjord, which was about 1.8 km covering deglaciation time period up to 1900 years. We used 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing based approaches using Illumina paired end sequencing to delineate the bacterial community composition associated with glacier foreland ecosystem.