Natural vegetation restoration promotes soil quality improvement in rocky desertification areas of southwestern China

IF 3.9 2区农林科学 Q1 AGRONOMY

Plant and Soil Pub Date : 2025-02-13 DOI:10.1007/s11104-025-07268-y

Shuhui Tan, Zhongfeng Zhang, Longwu Zhou, Ying Li, Shihong Lu, Chungui Tang, Limin Yu

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Background and aims

Afforestation and natural recovery are distinct approaches to vegetation restoration that are effective in rocky desertified areas of southwestern China, reestablishing vegetation cover. However, how these strategies remediate rocky desertified soils remains unclear. We investigated Delavaya toxocarpa plantations (monocultures) of various ages and natural restoration vegetation.

Methods

We analyzed the differences in the physical and chemical properties, enzyme activities, and microbial characteristics of rocky desertification soils under different restoration strategies. We studied how soil microbial diversity and soil properties respond to increasing afforestation durations.

Results

Bulk density, total phosphorus, total potassium, available phosphorus, and available potassium decreased with increasing stand age, whereas pH, soil organic carbon, and total and available nitrogen increased. Urease, catalase, and alkaline phosphatase activities initially increased and then decreased. Most soil indices were markedly higher under natural vegetation restoration than under plantation forests. Microbial diversity increased with standing age under artificial afforestation. The proportional distributions of predominant bacterial phyla (Proteobacteria, Chloroflexi, and Firmicutes) differed significantly among stand ages. No significant differences were observed in structure or diversity of soil microbial communities between the natural vegetation restoration and plantation treatments for the same restoration duration (18 years). Bacterial and fungal community compositions were influenced by available phosphorus, suggesting that soil phosphorus is a limiting factor for microbial communities. Artificial afforestation in rocky desertification areas significantly increased soil microbial diversity with increasing forest age.

Conclusion

Natural vegetation restoration enhanced soil microbial diversity and improved nutrient content and enzyme activity in the studied rocky desertified soils.

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来源期刊

Plant and Soil 农林科学-农艺学

CiteScore

8.20

自引率

8.20%

发文量

543

审稿时长

2.5 months

期刊介绍： Plant and Soil publishes original papers and review articles exploring the interface of plant biology and soil sciences, and that enhance our mechanistic understanding of plant-soil interactions. We focus on the interface of plant biology and soil sciences, and seek those manuscripts with a strong mechanistic component which develop and test hypotheses aimed at understanding underlying mechanisms of plant-soil interactions. Manuscripts can include both fundamental and applied aspects of mineral nutrition, plant water relations, symbiotic and pathogenic plant-microbe interactions, root anatomy and morphology, soil biology, ecology, agrochemistry and agrophysics, as long as they are hypothesis-driven and enhance our mechanistic understanding. Articles including a major molecular or modelling component also fall within the scope of the journal. All contributions appear in the English language, with consistent spelling, using either American or British English.