Logging road development is considered as potentially more damaging to a tropical forest than the felling of the actual trees. However, little work has been conducted to determine how logging road development impacts the soil microbial communities and associated C and N cycle activities in tropical forests. This study was conducted within an upland tropical forest in the Northern Zone of Costa Rica that had a 2-year abandoned logging road system (used for harvesting trees felled during a tornado) to determine how development of logging roads affected soil C and N cycle activities, efficiency of organic C use, and bacterial and fungal community compositions. Soil samples from a set of logging roads, the road edges, and adjacent primary forests were analyzed for C, N metrics, the Microbial Quotients, and DNA-based microbial taxonomic community compositions; which were tested for differences using multivariate statistical analyses. The logging road soils had significantly greater bulk density and clay, and lower levels of sand, TN, NO₃⁻, NO₃⁻/NH₄⁺, TOC, C Biomass, and Microbial Quotients compared to the road edge and forest soils. The composition of the total bacterial genera of the road edge and forest soils were similar to one another and different from that of the logging road soils, and the composition of the total fungal genera was unique within each of the three areas sampled. The relative abundance of DNA sequences of N-cycle bacteria were greater, and lignin degrading bacteria and wood rot/lignin degrading fungi were less in the logging roads compared to the edge and forest soils. These results suggest that the rate of recovery of both the C and N cycle activities and associated microbial groups in the soils from the road edges is occurring more rapidly than in the abandoned logging road soils. Thus, we suggest that a new tropical forest management practice should include the movement of the slash and debris from the road edge regions onto the logging roads after abandonment, as it would enhance the rate of recovery of both the C and N cycle activities in the soils, and perhaps begin to address the concern that logging roads add an additional 10–15 years to tropical forest recovery following deforestation.

伐木公路的发展被认为比砍伐实际树木对热带森林的破坏更大。但是，几乎没有开展任何工作来确定伐木道路的发展如何影响土壤微生物群落以及热带森林中相关的碳和氮循环活动。这项研究是在哥斯达黎加北部地区的一个陆地热带热带森林中进行的，该森林有一个为期两年的废弃伐木公路系统（用于收割龙卷风期间砍伐的树木），以确定伐木公路的发展如何影响土壤碳和氮循环活动，有机碳利用效率以及细菌和真菌群落组成。分析了一组伐木道路，道路边缘和邻近原始森林的土壤样品的C，N指标，微生物商，基于DNA的微生物分类群落组成；使用多元统计分析对差异进行了测试。伐木道路土壤的堆积密度和黏土含量明显更高，而沙，TN，NO含量较低₃ ^-，NO ₃ ^- / NH ₄ ⁺，TOC，C生物量和微生物商与道路边缘和森林土壤的比较。道路边缘和森林土壤的总细菌属组成彼此相似，与伐木道路土壤的细菌属组成不同，并且在三个采样区域中，真菌总属的组成在每个区域中都是唯一的。与边缘土壤和森林土壤相比，伐木道路上N循环细菌DNA序列的相对丰度更高，木质素降解细菌和木腐/木质素降解真菌更少。这些结果表明，从废弃道路的土壤中，土壤中碳和氮循环活动以及相关微生物群的恢复速率比在废弃的伐木土壤中恢复的速度更快。因此，