Abstract

Recently, there has been increasing research focus on microorganism community structure in secondary forest succession. This study aimed at analyzing the community diversity of bacteria and fungi in the forest in six different ecological regions of Changbai Mountains in Jilin Province of China, by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphisms (T-RFLP). Results show that the fungal and bacterial diversity differed greatly between forest succession and plants species. Species richness and the Shannon’s diversity index of fungi and bacteria in broad mid-age forest and broad-leaved Korean pine mixed maturity forest were higher than that of other forest successions in the six regions. The results of principal component analysis (PCA) and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) indicate that the stages of forest successions had no strict specificity with bacterial community diversity but strict specificity with fungal community, while environmental condition had great influence on fungal community diversity and soil nutrient, and pH was a primary influencing factor. These results suggest that the environmental conditions exhibit greater influence on the community diversity of fungi than bacteria. And soil nutrient and pH were more indicative of the change of community diversity of fungi and bacteria.

Key words: Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphisms (T-RFLP), forest succession, Northeast China.