Microbial Community and Ecological Network Responses to Spartina alterniflora Invasion in Coastal Wetlands: A Mini-Review with Bibliometric Insights

Abstract

Spartina alterniflora invasion has become one of the most intensively studied plant-invasion processes in coastal wetlands because its effects extend beyond aboveground vegetation change to soil microbial communities, microbial interaction networks, and biogeochemical cycling. This mini-review synthesizes a Web of Science dataset of 209 records retrieved with a search strategy linking S. alterniflora, microbial communities or networks, and invasion-related terms. A CiteSpace-compatible bibliometric analysis showed that the literature expanded markedly after 2020, with publication output peaking in 2025 within the exported dataset. The keyword structure was centered on S. alterniflora, salt marsh, coastal wetland, plant invasion, microbial community, bacterial community, carbon, and nitrogen, indicating a field that now connects invasion ecology with microbial network ecology and ecosystem-function research. Evidence from chronosequence, rhizosphere, mangrove, and salt-marsh studies shows that S. alterniflora invasion often restructures bacterial and fungal communities through changes in organic matter, salinity, pH, hydrology, and plant-derived substrates. Network studies suggest a context-dependent reorganization rather than a uniform increase or decrease in complexity: bulk-soil fungal or mixed microbial networks often become simpler or less stable, whereas rhizosphere, host-associated bacterial, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal subnetworks may become more modular or more densely connected. Functionally, these microbial changes are linked to denitrification, N2O emissions, sulfur cycling, decomposition, soil organic carbon dynamics, and carbon-cycling functional genes. Future studies should combine standardized network inference, multi-omics, manipulative experiments, and restoration monitoring to move from correlation-based network description toward causal understanding of belowground invasion mechanisms.