Variability in soil nematode communities across recovery patches in degraded Alpine meadows of the Yellow River source region

Summary Accurate measurements of soil nematode communities are important for an in-depth understanding of the ecological functions of soil nematodes. High throughput sequencing (HTS) has been reported extensively, but the concordance between HTS and morphological identification results is still lacking. To compare two methods, we selected bare patches (BP), short-term recovery patches (SP), middle-term recovery patches (MP) and long-term recovery patches (LP) of different restoration succession stages in three sample sites to survey the nematode characteristics. In addition to nematode community structure and community ecological function, common nematode genera in BP, SP, MP and LP were compared by two methods: HTS and morphological identification. The results show that the number of species identified in the morphological analysis was lower than using HTS. The soil nematode diversity in different recovery patches was LP > MP > SP > BP. The indices of Shannon-Wiener, Pielou, Simpson and species number of different recovery patches based on HTS reflected the biodiversity of nematode communities, which was consistent with the results of morphological identification. Of the common nematode genera, Coslenchus , Aphelenchus and Leptonchus showed a significant correlation by the two methods. Although both methods have limitations, the HTS provides a more effective means of observing soil nematode biodiversity levels for rapid insight across recovery patches in degraded alpine meadows of the Yellow River source region in our results.