Influence of Natural and Man-Made Forests on Community Assembly and Species, Functional, and Soil Microbial Diversity

Abstract

Although an increasing amount of attention is being paid to how human activities alter plant communities, little is known about the consequences of these changes on species’ assemblages and biodiversity patterns. Using three forest types (a Pinus yunnanensis man-made forest; Eucalyptus smithii man-made forest; and natural secondary forest) in mid-Yunnan, China, we investigated the distribution patterns of species and traits and analyzed diversity patterns and relationships, including those between species diversity, functional diversity, and soil microbial diversity. We found that species co-occurrence patterns in the Pinus yunnanensis man-made forest and natural secondary forest were non-random. The specific leaf area in the Eucalyptus smithii man-made forest and leaf nitrogen concentration in the Pinus yunnanensis man-made forest were both over-dispersed according to the mean Euclidean neighbor distance in the trait space. The natural secondary forest had higher values of species diversity, functional diversity, community-weighted means, and soil microbial diversity than the man-made forest types did. An overall low covariation between species diversity and community-weighted means suggested that the coexistence of many species does not necessarily support functional differentiation among these species. Variance partitioning revealed that soil microbial diversity was mainly regulated by community-weighted means. In conclusion, our results suggest that the naturally recovering forest was better than man-made plantations based on biodiversity patterns.