A fundamental challenge of biogeochemistry is to discover the unifying links between soil microbes and nutrient cycling. Similarly, a fundamental goal of soil ecology is to understand how soil microbial communities change under external pressures, such as land use and land change. Improved understanding of these links between microbial structure and ecosystem function will improve prediction of ecosystem models. We sampled top 5-cm soil along a land use gradient (6 sites from pristine forest to degraded land) in the highlands of Malaysian Borneo to assess the links between soil microbes (quantified by next generation sequencing) and ecosystem function (carbon decomposition rate and carbon efflux), and to understand how it changes due to external pressure of land use and land change.
Results/Conclusions
Our results suggest no significant difference in organic matter decomposition rate among land uses, while organic matter stabilization is significantly higher in pristine forests, providing evidence that land use can impact the capacity of tropical forests to sequester carbon in the form of soil organic matter. Microbial community composition, based on shifts in relative abundance of dominant bacterial phyla, is strongly correlated to soil pH. Carbon efflux shows a strong relationship between temperature and different patterns in pristine forested versus agriculture sites. Our results highlight the links between land use and land change with physical and biological soil properties and how it translates into ecosystem functions.