Abstract
Thinning is an important forest management practice to mitigate the adverse effects of increased drought on tree growth and productivity. However, the responses of the soil microbial community and its functions to thinning and drought have received little attention in planted forests. In this study, we assessed the combined effects of thinning (30% and 45% of trees removed) and precipitation reduction (− 30%) on soil fungal and bacterial communities and the multifunctionality associated with carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycling during one growing season (from April to September) in a 16-year-old larch plantation. We found that 45% thinning, but not 30%, significantly increased soil multifunctionality during the growing season (except for April and May) and fungal diversity in June. In contrast, precipitation reduction significantly decreased soil multifunctionality during the growing season and fungal diversity in June. Thinning also considerably suppressed the relative abundance of ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi during the growing season, whereas precipitation reduction significantly increased the relative abundance of ECM fungi in June and July. Furthermore, soil multifunctionality was more related to ECM and saprotrophic fungal communities than to bacterial communities. Our results suggest that a high thinning level can mitigate the negative effect of precipitation reduction on soil multifunctionality and fungal diversity, and this effect depends on the sampling month. Therefore, thinning is recommended as a tool to mitigate the impact of precipitation reduction on soil multifunctionality and the microbial community in larch plantations.
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Data availability
The raw sequence data have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (BioProject PRJNA789094 for fungi and PRJNA849713 for bacteria).
References
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Funding
This study was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Non-profit Research Institution of Chinese Academy of Forestry (CAFYBB2022ZC001, LYSZX202002) and General Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (31971652).
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Hongxing Wang, Xiaomei Sun, and Shougong Zhang designed the research; Hongxing Wang, Dongsheng Chen, and Chunyan Wu performed the experiments and collected the data; Hongxing Wang analyzed the data and drafted the manuscript; Liangdong Guo, Xiaomei Sun and Shougong Zhang helped revise the manuscript.
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Fig. S1
Dynamics of soil volumetric moisture at a depth of 10 cm in randomly selected six subplots form April to October of 2020. The arrows indicate the sampling date. The soil volumetric moisture was automatically recorded once every hour with 3 randomly set probes in each subplot. The data shown in the Fig. based on the daily averages in each subplot. Treatments: CKN: no thinning with natural precipitation; CKR: no thinning with precipitation reduction; T30N: 30% thinning with natural precipitation; T30R: 30% thinning with precipitation reduction; T45N: 45% thinning with natural precipitation; T45R: 45% thinning with precipitation reduction (PNG 1105 kb)
Fig. S2
The relative abundance of ectomycorrhizal fungi (a) and saprotrophic fungi (b) in thinning and precipitation reduction treatments during the growing season. Data are means ± SE (n = 5). Different letters indicate significant differences among treatments within the same sampling month based on Tukey’s HSD test at P < 0.05 level. CK: no thinning; T30: 30% of trees removed; T45: 45% trees removed (PNG 513 kb)
Fig. S3
The relative abundance of ectomycorrhizal fungi (a) and saprotrophic fungi (b) at the genus level in thinning and precipitation reduction treatments during the growing season. Three-way ANOVA showing the effects of thinning, precipitation reduction, sampling month and their interactions on bacteria and fungi. Asterisks indicate the statistical significance (ns P > 0.05, * P < 0.05, ** P < 0.01, *** P < 0.001). Treatments: CKN: no thinning with natural precipitation; CKR: no thinning with precipitation reduction; T30N: 30% thinning with natural precipitation; T30R: 30% thinning with precipitation reduction; T45N: 45% thinning with natural precipitation; T45R: 45% thinning with precipitation reduction (PNG 552 kb)
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Wang, H., Chen, D., Wu, C. et al. Forest thinning alleviates the negative effects of precipitation reduction on soil microbial diversity and multifunctionality. Biol Fertil Soils 59, 423–440 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00374-023-01716-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00374-023-01716-6