Change of community structure of soil mites in the early stage of ecological restoration in moderate rocky desertification of Karst area, Guizhou Province, China.

Abstract

The monitoring of soil mite community is an important part of ecological restoration monitoring. Changes of community structure in soil mites could reflect effects of ecological restoration in degraded environment. In different seasons of 2014, we investigated soil mites in the moderate rocky desertification ecological restoration area of Chaoying small watershed in Bijie City, Guizhou Pro-vince. We compared the community structure of soil mites in native Quercus variabilis forest and moderate rocky desertification area. The results showed that soil mites in ecological restoration area of moderate rocky desertification belonged to three orders, 35 families, and 58 genera, with Haploze-tes and Vilhenabates being the dominant genera. Higher number of genera, abundance, and indivi-dual densities were found in upper soil layer. The community structure of predatory Gamasina mites was mainly r-selected, and that of Oribatida mites was mainly Poronota (P-type). In the moderate rocky desertification ecological restoration area, both the abundance and individual density of soil mites were higher than that in moderate rocky desertification area and Q. variabilis forest, while the number of genera, diversity index and richness index were higher than that in moderate rocky desertification area, but lower than that in Q. variabilis forest. On the basis of the control area, 32 genera of mites were recovered and added, accounting for 55.2% of the total number of mite genera in the restoration area. In the whole study area, the number of mite genera were significantly correlated with soil available potassium, richness index, and organic carbon content. The number of indivi-duals, individual density, diversity index, richness index separately had significant correlations with the content of available potassium. The richness index had significant correlation with the content of organic matter. Our results suggested that the vegetation restoration of rocky desertification was beneficial to the restoration of mite community and improvement of soil environment, and that the dominant groups, new groups, and restoration groups of soil mites could indicate environment changes. However, the relationships between soil mite community structure and vegetation, soil physical and chemical factors in the restoration area remained to be further studied.