Record Details

Tropical forest conversion to rubber plantation affects soil micro- & mesofaunal community & diversity

IR@CSIR-NEERI

View Archive Info
 
 
Field Value
 
Title Tropical forest conversion to rubber
plantation affects soil micro- &
mesofaunal community & diversity
 
Creator Singh, Dharmesh
Slik, J. W. Ferry
Jeon, Yoon-Seong
Tomlinson, Kyle W.
Yang, Xiaodong
Wang, Jin
Kerfahi, Dorsaf
Porazinska, Dorota L.
Adams, Jonathan M.
 
Subject Microbiology
Biotechnology
 
Description Tropical rainforests play important roles in carbon sequestration and are hot spots for biodiversity.
Tropical forests are being replaced by rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) plantations, causing widespread
concern of a crash in biodiversity. Such changes in aboveground vegetation might have stronger
impacts on belowground biodiversity. We studied tropical rainforest fragments and derived rubber
plantations at a network of sites in Xishuangbanna, China, hypothesizing a major decrease in diversity
with conversion to plantations. We used metabarcoding of the 18S rRNA gene and recovered 2313
OTUs, with a total of 449 OTUs shared between the two land-use types. The most abundant phyla
detected were Annelida (66.4% reads) followed by arthropods (15.5% reads) and nematodes (8.9%
reads). Of these, only annelids were significantly more abundant in rubber plantation. Taken together,
α- and β-diversity were significantly higher in forest than rubber plantation. Soil pH and spatial distance
explained a significant portion of the variability in phylogenetic community structure for both land-use
types. Community assembly was primarily influenced by stochastic processes. Overall it appears that
forest replacement by rubber plantation results in an overall loss and extensive replacement of soil
micro- and mesofaunal biodiversity, which should be regarded as an additional aspect of the impact of
forest conversion.
 
Publisher Nature Publishing Group
 
Date 2019-04-10
 
Type Article
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Identifier http://neeri.csircentral.net/1244/1/s41598-019-42333-4.pdf
Singh, Dharmesh and Slik, J. W. Ferry and Jeon, Yoon-Seong and Tomlinson, Kyle W. and Yang, Xiaodong and Wang, Jin and Kerfahi, Dorsaf and Porazinska, Dorota L. and Adams, Jonathan M. (2019) Tropical forest conversion to rubber plantation affects soil micro- & mesofaunal community & diversity. Scientific Reports, 9 (5893). ISSN 2045-2322
 
Relation http://www.nature.com/scientificreports
http://neeri.csircentral.net/1244/