Microbial interconnections in soil are pivotal to ecosystem services and restoration. However, little is known about how soil microbial interconnections respond to slash-and-burn agriculture and to the subsequent ecosystem restoration after the practice. Here, we used amplicon sequencing and co-occurrence network analyses to explore the interconnections within soil bacterial and fungal communities in response to slash-and-burn practice and a spontaneous restoration (spanning ca. 60 years) of tropical forests after the practice, in Papua New Guinea. We found significantly higher complexity and greater variations in fungal networks than in those of bacteria, despite no significant changes observed in bacterial or fungal networks across successional stages. Within most successional stages, bacterial core co-occurrences (co-occurrences consistently present across all sub-networks in a stage) were more frequent than those of fungi, indicating higher stability of interconnections between bacteria along succession. The stable interconnections occurred frequently between bacterial taxa (i.e. Sporosarcina, Acidimicrobiale and Bacillaceae) and between ectomycorrhizal fungi (Boletaceae and Russula ochroleuca), implying important ecological roles of these taxa in the ecosystem restoration. Collectively, our results provide new insight into microbial interconnections in response to slash-and-burn agriculture and the subsequent ecosystem restoration, thus promoting a better understanding of microbial roles in ecosystem services and restoration.

中文翻译：

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刀耕火种后低地森林生态恢复梯度下土壤微生物的相互联系

土壤中的微生物互连对于生态系统服务和恢复至关重要。然而，关于土壤微生物的相互联系如何对刀耕火种的农业以及耕作后的随后生态系统恢复的反应知之甚少。在这里，我们使用扩增子测序和共现网络分析来探索土壤细菌和真菌群落内部的相互联系，以应对刀耕火种的习俗以及实践后热带森林自发恢复（跨越约60年）。巴布亚新几内亚。我们发现，与细菌相比，真菌网络的复杂性和变异性要高得多，尽管在整个演替阶段细菌或真菌网络中没有观察到显着变化。在大多数接班阶段，细菌核心共存（一个阶段中所有子网络中始终存在的共存）比真菌更常见，这表明细菌之间相互连接的稳定性更高。稳定的相互联系经常发生在细菌类群之间（即Sporosarcina，Acidimicrobiale和芽孢杆菌）和外生菌根真菌（间牛肝菌科和黄白红菇），这意味着这些类群的生态系统恢复的重要的生态作用。总体而言，我们的研究结果为应对刀耕火种的农业以及随后的生态系统恢复提供了关于微生物相互联系的新见解，从而促进了人们对微生物在生态系统服务和恢复中的作用的更好理解。