Diversity and Taxonomy of Soil Bacterial Communities in Urban and Rural Mangrove Forests of the Panama Bay.

Mangrove ecosystems are threatened worldwide by a wide range of factors including climate change, coastal development, and pollution. The effects of these factors on soil bacterial communities of Neotropical mangroves and their temporal dynamics is largely undocumented. Here we compared the diversity and taxonomic composition of bacterial communities in the soil of two mangrove forest sites of the Panama Bay: Juan Diaz (JD), an urban mangrove forest in Panama City surrounded by urban development, with occurrence of five mangrove species, and polluted with solid waste and sewage; and Bayano (B), a rural mangrove forest without urban development, without solid waste pollution, and with the presence of two mangrove species. Massive amplicon sequencing of the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene and community analyses were implemented. In total, 20,691 bacterial amplicon sequence variants were identified, and the bacterial community was more diverse in the rural mangrove forest based on Faith's phylogenetic diversity index. The three dominant phyla of bacteria found and shared between the two sites were Proteobacteria, Desulfobacterota, and Chloroflexi. The ammonia oxidizing archaea class Nitrosphaeria was found among the top 10 most abundant. Dominant genera of bacteria that occurred in the two mangrove sites were: BD2-11_terrestrial_group (Gemmatimonadota), EPR3968-O8a-Bc78 (Gammaproteobacteria),