Natural succession and artificial management have different effects on soil microbial ecological patterns in wetland resulting from land-use change

Abstract

Soil microbiomes play a crucial role in maintaining soil ecosystem functions and are sensitive to environmental changes. Land-use change is one of the important human activities affecting the Earth ecosystem. Understanding microbial community dynamics in land-use change is a key step in assessing and predicting its impact on ecological sustainability. Wetland restoration after land-use change has been widely implemented to help conserve ecological services, but the patterns of microbial dynamics during wetland formation, natural succession and artificial management remain unclear. In this study, taking coal-mining subsidence areas as research areas, soil samples from farmland, newly formed wetlands (1, 6 and 15 years old) following farmland subsidence, and a wetland under artificial management were collected to explore the ecological patterns of soil microbiome in response to land-use change. Results showed that the conversion from farmland to wetland increased microbial α-diversity (4.09 % for bacteria and 12.94 % for fungi), β-diversity (5.95 % for bacteria and 13.89 % for fungi), soil multifunctionality (293.91 %) and co-occurrence network complexity. The relative importance of stochastic processes in the microbial community assembly decreased in the early stage of wetland formation and further increased with wetland succession. Soil multifunctionality significantly decreased by 181.72 % after the artificial management in wetland. Additionally, bacteria and fungi responded differently to artificial management, and bacteria were more sensitive to the land-use change than fungi. Overall, our study broadens the understanding of soil microbial ecological patterns in newly formed wetland after land-use change, while emphasizing the importance of maintaining newly formed wetlands in its natural state.