Recovery patterns of soil bacterial and fungal communities in Chinese boreal forests along a fire chronosequence

Abstract

Wildfire has profound and pervasive consequences for forest ecosystems via directly altering soil physicochemical properties and modulating microbial community. In this study, we examined the changes in soil properties and microbial community composition and structure at different periods after highly severe wildfire events (44 plots, 113 samples) in the Chinese Great Khingan Mountains. We also separated charcoal from burnt soils to establish the relationship between microbial community structures in soils and charcoal. We found that wildfire only significantly altered bacterial and fungal β-diversity, but had no effect on microbial α-diversity across a 29-year chronosequence. The network analysis revealed that the complexity and connectivity of bacterial and fungal communities were significantly increased from 17 years after fire, compared with either unburnt soils or soils with recent fires (0-4 years after fire). Differential abundance analysis suggested that bacterial and fungal OTUs were enriched or depleted only during 0-4 years after fire compared with the unburnt soils. In addition, soil pH, dissolved organic C and dissolved organic N were key determinants of soil bacterial and fungal communities during 17-29 years after fire. The fire-derived charcoal provided a new niche for microbial colonization, and microbes colonized in the charcoal had a significantly different community structure from those of burnt soils. Our data suggest that soil bacterial and fungal communities changed significantly during the recovery from fire events in terms of the abundance and co-occurrence networks in the boreal forest ecosystems.

Keywords: Charcoal; Fire history; Legacy effect; Microbial community; Pyrogenic carbon; Wildfire.