Response of soil microbial community to forest ground cover manipulation in boreal forests

Open lichen woodlands are expanding in boreal forests and may become an alternative state to closed-canopy feather moss forests , which will likely negatively affect boreal forest ecosystem services such as climate change mitigation, carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and timber supply. A 10-year manipulative study conducted in a slow growing open lichen woodland, which included lichen and lichen removal and moss transplantation treatments, revealed that the ground cover has a direct influence on soil properties and tree growth . This experimental design offers the opportunity to test for the effect of ground cover on soil microbial communities without the confounding effects that are often present in observational studies where site and soil conditions are correlated with vegetation. Using this experimental design, our main objective was to evaluate the effects of changes in forest ground cover on the composition and the diversity of soil bacterial and fungal communities for period of 10 years and to determine the relationships between soil growing conditions and properties of the soil microbiome. In addition, we compare these results with those from a productive closed-canopy forest with a moss ground cover used as a control.