Succession of soil nematode-trapping fungi following fire disturbance in forest

Abstract

ABSTRACT Soil microbes’ response to sudden environmental changes is very complicated and has been lively debated. There are a handful of questions yet to answer: are there any succession rules for different soil microbial species to fit in the suddenly changed environment? And what is the correlation between the community succession and the habitat recovery? These questions remain unanswered yet. Nematode-trapping fungi (NTF) play a very important role in the soil ecosystem and can be studied by traditional culture method easily. So, in this study, the NTF community in two burned sites at two depths (0–10 and 10–20 cm) was investigated in comparison with adjacent unburned sites. While the original NTF community structure was rather different in the two unburned sites, the NTF community presented a consistent pattern in the two burned sites: (1) considerable amount of NTF in the shallow soil (0–10 cm) was killed by the extremely high temperature of fire and the vacant niches were subsequently replaced with NTF communities that were originally distributed in the deep soil (10–20 cm); (2) dominant species in the community changed from Arthrobotrys fungi which showed stronger saprophytic ability to Dactylellina fungi which showed stronger capturing ability; and (3) the vacant niche caused by the movement of Dactylellina fungi was taken by Drechslerella fungi. The study shows that microbes inhabited in the deep soil played a critical role in the after-fire process to recovery of the soil ecological system.