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

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	Microbiology Biotechnology
Divisions:	UNSPECIFIED
Depositing User:	Mr. RK Lohiya
Date Deposited:	26 Apr 2019 09:39
Last Modified:	26 Apr 2019 09:39
URI:	http://neeri.csircentral.net/id/eprint/1244

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