Abstract
Vegetation restoration has been widely used in karst rocky desertification (KRD) areas of southwestern China, but the response of microbial community to revegetation has not been well characterized. We investigated the diversity, structure, and co-occurrence patterns of bacterial communities in soils of five vegetation types (grassland, shrubbery, secondary forest, pure plantation and mixed plantation) in KRD area using high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene. Bray-Curtis dissimilarity analysis revealed that 15 bacterial community samples were clustered into five groups that corresponded very well to the five vegetation types. Shannon diversity was positively correlated with pH and Ca2+ content but negatively correlated with organic carbon, total nitrogen, and soil moisture. Redundancy analysis indicated that soil pH, Ca2+ content, organic carbon, total nitrogen, and soil moisture jointly influenced bacterial community structure. Co-occurrence network analysis revealed non-random assembly patterns of bacterial composition in the soils. Bryobacter, GR-WP33-30, and Rhizomicrobium were identified as keystone genera in co-occurrence network. These results indicate that diverse soil physicochemical properties and potential interactions among taxa during vegetation restoration may jointly affect the bacterial community structure in KRD regions.
Highlights
Southwestern China is one of the three distribution centers of Karst in the world
Total nitrogen (TN), Soil organic carbon (SOC), and Soil moisture (SM) content generally increased as plant communities changed from grass to shrub and forest, which suggests that vegetation restoration accelerates organic matter accumulation and improves soil moisture conditions in Karst ecosystems
We determined the effects of vegetation restoration and microbial interactions on the structure of bacterial communities in five vegetation types in karst rocky desertification (KRD) areas
Summary
Southwestern China is one of the three distribution centers of Karst in the world. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Karst regions in China experienced severe soil erosion, vegetation loss, and desertification caused by intensive anthropogenic activity, referred to as karst rocky desertification (KRD; Wang et al, 2004; Jiang et al, 2014). Revegetation has been widely implemented in ecological conservation and restoration efforts because it improves soil nutrient conditions and other environmental factors (Crouzeilles et al, 2016; Feng et al, 2016). Bacterial Community Responses to Revegetation and diversified water and soil conservation projects, all of which have been based on vegetation restoration (Wang et al, 2004; Jiang et al, 2014). Soil microbial communities and co-occurrence patterns to vegetation restoration are largely unknown. This information provides invaluable reference to the appropriate management and conservation of the degraded karst ecosystem
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