Effects of vegetational type and soil depth on soil microbial communities on the Loess Plateau of China

ABSTRACT

Soil microbial communities are very sensitive to changes in land use and are often used as indicators of soil fertility. We evaluated the microbial communities in the soils of four types of vegetation (cropland (CP), natural grassland (NG), broadleaf forest (BF) and coniferous forest (CF)) at depths of 0–10 and 10–20 cm on the Loess Plateau in China using phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) profiling and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) of DNA amplicons from polymerase chain reactions. The soil microbial communities were affected more by vegetation type than by soil depth. Total organic carbon, total nitrogen, soil-water content, pH, bulk density (BD) and C:N ratio were all significantly associated with the composition of the communities. Total PLFA, bacterial PLFA and fungal PLFA were significantly higher in the BF than the CP. The DGGE analyses showed that NG had the most diverse bacterial and fungal communities. These results confirmed the significant effect of vegetation type on soil microbial communities. BFs and natural grass were better than the CFs for the restoration of vegetation on the Loess Plateau.

KEYWORDS:

• Vegetation types
• soil depths
• PLFA
• PCR-DGGE
• Loess Plateau

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [41371510]; Science and Technology Research and Development Program of Shaanxi Province, China [2011KJXX36] and Program for West Younger Scholar, Chinese Academy of Sciences [XAB2015A05].