Characteristics of fauna community structure and its relationship to soil physico-chemical properties in tea plantation soil

Abstract

In order to investigate the ecological changes caused by the conversion of wasteland to tea plantation in the low mountains and hills in Mingshan County,western Sichuan,the differences between tea and mixed plantations in terms of soil fauna,its community structure composition and vertical spatial distribution were studied in four seasons.A total of 11 720 individual soil animals were collected by the hand sorting,Baermann and Tullgren methods.They belonged to 5 phyla,15 classes,32 orders and 36 groups.The dominant groups in both plantation types were Acarina,Nematoda and Collembola.The number of groups,the Shannon-Wiener index,the evenness index,the density-groups index and complexity of the tea plantation were less than those of the mixed plantation,and the difference in the Shannon-Wiener index was significant(P0.05),and the difference in the number of groups and evenness index were highly significant(P0.01).The number of individuals and the Simpson index of the tea plantation were higher than those of the mixed plantation,and the difference in the Simpson index was highly significant.The seasonal fluctuation of the soil fauna in the tea plantation was more than in the mixed plantation.The numbers of groups and individuals,the community diversity and the homogeneity of soil fauna decreased with the increase of sampling depth.There were significant differences in group numbers and Shannon-Wiener index of soil fauna in different layers in the tea plantation,and were significant differences in number of groups and individuals,community diversity and homogeneity of soil fauna in the mixed plantation.In the microenvironment of the tea plantation,the soil organic matter,natural water content,available nitrogen and total nitrogen showed significant or highly significant partial correlations with soil fauna community indices.However,there was no significant partial correlation of the bulk density,field capacity,pH,CEC,available potassium or available phosphorus with the soil fauna in the tea plantation(P0.05).