Microorganisms play a crucial role with special functioning involved in various nutrient cycling and energy transfer in saline lake environment. However, little is known about how the microbial community dynamics and metabolic functions in degraded saline lake environments under climate change. To address this knowledge gap, a cultivation-independent method of amplicon sequencing was using to identify and analyze the microbial community and its potential ecological functions from the sediment and degraded area. It was found that the microbial community diversity was significantly lower in the degraded areas than that in the sediment samples. The Pseudomonadota was dominant in Barkol saline lake. The abundance of Desulfobacterota and Bacillota in the degraded areas was lower than in the lake sediment, while Pseudomonadota, Acidobacteriota, and Actinobacteriota show an opposite trend. The βNTI showed that microbial community assembly was primarily driven by deterministic processes in Brakol saline lake ecosystems, and by stochastic processes at the boundary between sediment and degraded areas. Function prediction showed that sulfur metabolism, particularly sulfate respiration, was much higher in sediment samples than in the degraded areas. Overall, these findings contribute to our understanding of how microorganisms adapt to extreme environments and their role in the degradation of saline lakes under environmental change.

saline lake, degradation, microbial community, diversity, ecological function