Contributions of Understory and/or Overstory Vegetations to Soil Microbial PLFA and Nematode Diversities in Eucalyptus Monocultures

Ecological interactions between aboveground and belowground biodiversity have received many attentions in the recent decades. Although soil biodiversity declined with the decrease of plant diversity, many previous studies found plant species identities were more important than plant diversity in controlling soil biodiversity. This study focused on the responses of soil biodiversity to the altering of plant functional groups, namely overstory and understory vegetations, rather than plant diversity gradient. We conducted an experiment by removing overstory and/or understory vegetation to compare their effects on soil microbial phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) and nematode diversities in eucalyptus monocultures. Our results indicated that both overstory and understory vegetations could affect soil microbial PLFA and nematode diversities, which manifested as the decrease in Shannon–Wiener diversity index (H′) and Pielou evenness index (J) and the increase in Simpson dominance index (λ) after vegetation removal. Soil microclimate change explained part of variance of soil biodiversity indices. Both overstory and understory vegetations positively correlated with soil microbial PLFA and nematode diversities. In addition, the alteration of soil biodiversity might be due to a mixing effect of bottom-up control and soil microclimate change after vegetation removal in the studied plantations. Given the studied ecosystem is common in humid subtropical and tropical region of the world, our findings might have great potential to extrapolate to large scales and could be conducive to ecosystem management and service.