Soil microbes re-establish plant diversity and ecosystem functions after disturbance events. Deterministic and stochastic processes are expected to contribute to microbial community assembly during long-term ecosystem recovery. We characterized soil prokaryotic and fungal communities, to determine their assembly patterns, along two chronosequences with early to later successional subtropical forests. Prokaryotic and fungal community composition was more variable in early successional forests but converged in the later successional forests. The community composition was governed by deterministic processes in the early stages, while the relative influence of stochasticity increased in the later stages. Environmental factors that predicted the shift in deterministic and stochastic balance varied within and across successional stages. In particular, the compositional dissimilarity of plant communities strongly predicted the relative influences of the two processes during succession. These findings suggest that the relative influences of deterministic and stochastic processes in shaping microbial community assembly shift during secondary succession. Consequently, plant communities are important predictors of assembly processes in soil microbial communities during long-term ecosystem recovery.

干扰事件发生后，土壤微生物会重新建立植物多样性和生态系统功能。在长期的生态系统恢复过程中，确定性和随机过程有望促进微生物群落的组装。我们对土壤原核和真菌群落进行了特征分析，以确定它们的组装模式，以及从早期到后期演替的亚热带森林的两个时间序列。在早期演替森林中原核和真菌群落组成变化较大，但在后来的演替森林中趋同。社区组成在早期由确定性过程控制，而随机性的相对影响则在后期增加。预测确定性和随机性平衡变化的环境因素在演替阶段之内和之间都存在差异。特别是，植物群落的组成差异强烈地预测了演替过程中两个过程的相对影响。这些发现表明，在继发演替过程中，确定性过程和随机过程对塑造微生物群落装配的相对影响会发生变化。因此，植物群落是长期生态系统恢复过程中土壤微生物群落装配过程的重要预测因子。