Community Structure of Soil Macrofauna of Larix kaempferi Plantation in Western Qinling Mountains

Abstract

Long-term human disturbance in the secondary forest ecosystem would have profound impacts on belowground ecological processes,whereas the community structure and functional diversity of soil fauna would be sensitive to the changes of belowground ecological processes,thus being an indicator of the changes.In this study,the method of hand-sorting was adopted to investigate the density of the soil macrofaunal community across three forest types of 10-year-old,20-year-old and 32-year-old Japanese conifer(Larix kaempferi) plantation in the western Qinling Mountains.PCA and one-way ANOVA analysis were applied to analyze the community structure and trophic group composition of soil macrofauna in different developmental stages of Japanese conifer plantations.Our results demonstrated that the density of the soil macrofauna community in the 10-year-old Japanese conifer plantation was significantly higher than that in the 20-year-old and 32-year-old Japanese conifer plantations,and the density of the soil macrofauna community in the 32-year-old Japanese conifer plantation was significantly higher than that in the 20-year-old Japanese conifer plantation.However,the diversity index and evenness index in the 20-year-old Japanese conifer plantation was significantly higher than that in the 10-year-old and 32-year-old Japanese conifer plantations.We also found a similar pattern in the abundance and group richness of ‘detritivores+ominivores' in different developmental stages of Japanese conifer plantations.There were significant changes of Diplopoda,Carabidae,Diptera larvae and Formicidae across the three development stages of Japanese conifer plantation,which can be used as indicators of the change in soil environments.