Drivers of soil microbial community assembly during recovery from selective logging and clear cutting

Despite important progress in understanding the impacts of forest clearing and logging on aboveground communities, how these disturbances affect soil microbial β-diversity and the ecological processes driving microbial assemblages are poorly understood. Further, whether and how the microbial shifts affect vegetation composition and diversity during recovery of post-logged forests remain elusive. 2. Using a spatial grid experiment design in a primary tropical forest intermixed with post-logged patches naturally recovered for half century in Hainan Island, China, we characterized and explained the distance-decay relationships of soil microbial similarities in primary, selectively logged and clear cut forests. 3. Selectively logged sites showed a lower spatial turnover rate of bacterial assemblages based on phylogenetic and taxonomic β-diversity, but a higher spatial turnover rate of fungal assemblages based on phylogenetic β-diversity, suggesting a higher level of phylogenetic variability...