Abstract

Soil microbial communities play a crucial role in ecosystem functioning. Past research has examined the effects of forest conversion on soil microbial composition and diversity, but it remains unknown how networks within these communities respond to forest conversion such as when tropical rainforest are replaced with rubber plantations. In this study, we used Illumina sequencing and metagenome shotgun sequencing to analyze bacterial and fungal community network structure in a large number of soil samples from tropical rainforest and rubber plantation sites in Hainan Island, China. Our results showed only a few shared network edges were observed in both bacterial and fungal communities, which indicates that forest conversion altered soil microbial network structure. We found a greater degree of network structure and a larger number of network edges among bacterial networks in samples from tropical rainforest compared to samples from rubber plantations. The difference was especially pronounced during the rainy season and indicates that rainforest bacterial networks were more complex than rubber plantation bacterial networks. However, rubber plantations soil fungal networks showed more higher links and higher network degree, suggesting that forest conversion does not reduce fungal network complexity. We found that some groups of Acidobacteria were keystone taxa in our tropical rainforest soils, while Actinobacteria were keystone taxa in rubber plantation soils. In addition, seasonal change had a strong effect on network degree, the complexity of soil bacterial and fungal network structure. In conclusion, forest conversion changed soil pH and other soil properties, such as available potassium (AK) and total nitrogen (TN), which resulted in changes in bacterial and fungal network composition and structure.

Highlights

  • Tropical rainforest have the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem and harbor more than 60% of all known plant and animal species (Dirzo and Raven, 2003)

  • Our results showed most nodes of bacterial networks (Figure 1) and fungal networks (Figure 2) varied with forest type in both the dry season and rainy season

  • Our knowledge about land-use impacts on soil ecosystems is mostly limited to biodiversity and ecosystem functions, leaving uncertainty about how soil networks change after forest conversion

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Summary

Introduction

Tropical rainforest have the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem and harbor more than 60% of all known plant and animal species (Dirzo and Raven, 2003). Over the past several decades, logging, mining, slash and burn agriculture have caused widespread deforestation and forest degradation. Of these,the conversion of forest to agriculture has caused the most forest loss (Li et al, 2007). Hainan is home to a large area of tropical rainforest rich in biodiversity. It is a part of the Indian-Malay rainforest system and the northern edge of the world's rainforest distribution. Rubber plantations account for almost a quarter of the total extent of vegetated areas on Hainan Island (Lan et al, 2020a)

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