Finally, it's out!
TLDR - Harvest partially mimics the effect of wildfire on boreal forest soil communities, but fungi and salvage harvest disturbed communities lag behind in recovery.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-16373-y
#soil #bacteria #fungi #arthropod #harvest #wildfire #disturbance #chronosequence
Soil communities following harvest have different early successional dynamics compared with post-wildfire patterns - Scientific Reports
Stand-replacing wildfire is the primary natural disturbance in jack pine-dominated boreal forests; but clearcut harvest also emulates this natural renewal process. We used a 60-year clearcut harvest chronosequence to assess whether soil communities became more similar to those in wildfire-origin stands over time. We assessed convergence across disturbance types at each stand development stage and recovery compared to the wildfire mature stand development stage (~ 85 years). To evaluate cumulative effects, we also assessed a 20-year salvage harvest chronosequence where wildfire was followed by salvage logging of fire-killed trees. Beta diversity analyses showed different recovery times among soil taxa. Following clearcut harvest, bacteria converged to wildfire reference conditions more quickly, followed by arthropods, whereas fungi did not converge within the study period. Soil communities in salvage-logged sites diverged from clearcut harvest and wildfire references suggesting compounded disturbance effects. This work showcases how highly-scalable DNA metabarcoding and bioinformatic tools can be applied to simultaneously monitor a diverse array of soil biota. In future work, tracking fungal and arthropod soil communities may provide more insights into the longer-term effects of current forest management practices and provide guidance when comparing alternative approaches.
New publication: Understanding the effects of organic versus conventional farming on
#soilorganiccarbon characteristics – a
#chronosequence study.
#organicfarming #SOC #soilmanagement https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2025.117371New NIOO publication: Pioneer Arabidopsis thaliana spans the succession gradient revealing a diverse root-associated
#microbiome.
#secondarysuccession #soil #bacteria #fungi #chronosequence https://doi.org/10.1186/s40793-023-00511-y
Pioneer Arabidopsis thaliana spans the succession gradient revealing a diverse root-associated microbiome - Environmental Microbiome
Background Soil microbiomes are increasingly acknowledged to affect plant functioning. Research in molecular model species Arabidopsis thaliana has given detailed insights of such plant-microbiome interactions. However, the circumstances under which natural A. thaliana plants have been studied so far might represent only a subset of A. thaliana’s full ecological context and potential biotic diversity of its root-associated microbiome. Results We collected A. thaliana root-associated soils from a secondary succession gradient covering 40 years of land abandonment. All field sites were situated on the same parent soil material and in the same climatic region. By sequencing the bacterial and fungal communities and soil abiotic analysis we discovered differences in both the biotic and abiotic composition of the root-associated soil of A. thaliana and these differences are in accordance with the successional class of the field sites. As the studied sites all have been under (former) agricultural use, and a climatic cline is absent, we were able to reveal a more complete variety of ecological contexts A. thaliana can appear and sustain in. Conclusions Our findings lead to the conclusion that although A. thaliana is considered a pioneer plant species and previously almost exclusively studied in early succession and disturbed sites, plants can successfully establish in soils which have experienced years of ecological development. Thereby, A. thaliana can be exposed to a much wider variation in soil ecological context than is currently presumed. This knowledge opens up new opportunities to enhance our understanding of causal plant-microbiome interactions as A. thaliana cannot only grow in contrasting soil biotic and abiotic conditions along a latitudinal gradient, but also when those conditions vary along a secondary succession gradient. Future research could give insights in important plant factors to grow in more ecologically complex later-secondary succession soils, which is an impending direction of our current agricultural systems.
A revised preprint "All boreal forest successional stages needed to maintain the full suite of soil biodiversity, community composition, and function following wildfire"
Read about how #soil #bacteria #fungi and #arthropod communities recover following wildfire along an 80 year #chronosequence and how this affects #biodiversity and #sustainability in a world where wildfires are expected to increase in frequency and intensity.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517085v2
Teresita Porter 🙋🏻♀️
NIOO-KNAW