Abstract
Different forest types exert essential impacts on soil physical-chemical characteristics by dominant tree species producing diverse litters and root exudates, thereby further regulating size and activity of soil microbial communities. However, the study accuracy is usually restricted by differences in climate, soil type and forest age. Our objective is to precisely quantify soil microbial biomass, basal respiration and enzyme activity of five natural secondary forest (NSF) types with the same stand age and soil type in a small climate region and to evaluate relationship between soil microbial and physical-chemical characters. We determined soil physical-chemical indices and used the chloroform fumigation-extraction method, alkali absorption method and titration or colorimetry to obtain the microbial data. Our results showed that soil physical-chemical characters remarkably differed among the NSFs. Microbial biomass carbon (Cmic) was the highest in wilson spruce soils, while microbial biomass nitrogen (Nmic) was the highest in sharptooth oak soils. Moreover, the highest basal respiration was found in the spruce soils, but mixed, Chinese pine and spruce stands exhibited a higher soil qCO2. The spruce soils had the highest Cmic/Nmic ratio, the greatest Nmic/TN and Cmic/Corg ratios were found in the oak soils. Additionally, the spruce soils had the maximum invertase activity and the minimum urease and catalase activities, but the maximum urease and catalase activities were found in the mixed stand. The Pearson correlation and principle component analyses revealed that the soils of spruce and oak stands obviously discriminated from other NSFs, whereas the others were similar. This suggested that the forest types affected soil microbial properties significantly due to differences in soil physical-chemical features.
Highlights
Soil microbes are the living component of soil organic matter [1]
The spruce soils was very distinguishing in soil chemical characteristics, since over half of the soil chemical variables (SOC, total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), available phosphorus (AP), Ca and Mg) were higher than those in other natural secondary forest (NSF)
Both C and N Microbial biomass carbon (Cmic) and Nmic were slightly higher than previous publication which investigated the soil microbial biomass of Chinese pine and sharptooth oak forests at the Huoditang forest region [40], the increase in the microbial biomass may be ascribed to one-decade accumulation of soil organic carbon, so it is not surprising that wilson spruce forest had the highest Cmic, given a high level of SOC
Summary
Despite comprising only a small percentage of the total mass of soil organic matter, soil microbes are considered to exert essential influences on rate at which nutrient cycle through soil ecosystems, act as both soil available nutrition sources by mineralizing and sinks by immobilizing [2,3,4]. Different forest types which are composed of specific tree species are considered to have species-specific effects on soil properties by litters and root exudates. The dominant tree species of forest types are capable of exerting important influences on the structure, function and activity of soil microbial communities via the quality and quantity of litters which input to soil, root architecture, nutrient requirements and decomposition process [10]
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