Enhanced soil quality after forest conversion to vegetable cropland and tea plantations has contrasting effects on soil microbial structure and functions

verfasst von

Lichao Fan, Guodong Shao, Yinghua Pang, Hongcui Dai, Lan Zhang, Peng Yan, Zhenhao Zou, Zheng Zhang, Jianchu Xu, Kazem Zamanian, Maxim Dorodnikov, Xin Li, Heng Gui, Wenyan Han

Abstract

Land-use changes could potentially exert a strong influence on soil quality and soil microbial communities. Moreover, microbial taxa are also important drivers of soil ecological functions. However, the linkage between soil quality and soil microbial communities is in need of deeper understanding. Here, we examined the effects of soil fertility quality on microbial community structure that identified by pyrosequencing and functions that predicted by the FAPROTAX functional annotations dataset after forest conversion to vegetable cropland and tea plantations. Soil quality index was significantly increased after natural forest (0.2) conversion to vegetable cropland (0.7) and tea plantations (0.3–0.6). Soil bacterial beta diversity significantly correlated to soil quality index, but the sensitivity of individual microbial groups varied in response to changes in soil quality. Higher soil quality promoted bacterial diversity in vegetable cropland but decreased it in tea plantations, which implied soil quality was a structural factor in bacterial community composition but had contrasting effects for croplands versus plantations. Agricultural management played a negative role in maintaining microbial interactions, as identified by the network analysis, and furthermore the analysis revealed key functions of the microbial communities. After land-use change, the abundance (e.g., level, intensity) of microbial groups involved in N-cycling increased in tea plantations but decreased in vegetable cropland. The abundance of microbes involved in C-cycling featured an opposite trend. Higher level of N-fixation in tea plantations but the higher abundance of N-oxidation in vegetable cropland was demonstrated. Higher abundance of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (8.5 × 10⁴ vs. 0.9–2.4 × 10⁴ copies) and ammonia-oxidizing archaea (3.0 × 10⁵ vs. 0.5–1.0 × 10⁵ copies) as identified by qPCR in cropland than that in plantations corroborated the FAPROTAX prediction. Therefore, the key taxa of soil microbial communities and microbial functions were largely dependent on changes in soil quality and determined responses to specific agricultural management.

Externe Organisation(en)

Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the Yuhang District
Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences
Kunming Institute of Botany Chinese Academy of Sciences
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology

Typ

Artikel

Journal

CATENA

Band

211

ISSN

0341-8162

Publikationsdatum

04.2022

Publikationsstatus

Veröffentlicht

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Erdoberflächenprozesse

Ziele für nachhaltige Entwicklung

SDG 2 – Kein Hunger, SDG 15 – Lebensraum Land

Elektronische Version(en)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2022.106029 (Zugang: Geschlossen)