Soil microbial communities in dry and moist tropical forests exhibit distinct shifts in community composition but not diversity with succession.

ABSTRACT: Soil microbial communities are integral to ecosystem function but our understanding of how they respond to secondary succession in fragmented landscapes is limited, particularly in tropical dry forests. We used DNA metabarcoding to evaluate successional changes in soil bacteria and fungi, comparing land managed for cattle, young, and older secondary forests at moist and dry sites in the Republic of Panama. We highlight key functional groups of microbes that interact with plants, including arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and plant pathogenic fungi. Plant diversity was higher at the moist site and increased with succession as the plant communities changed at both sites. By contrast, bacterial diversity was similar across sites and successional stages, and while

SUBMITTER: Saltonstall K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11878062 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature