LAUSR

Fire is usually considered a severe disturbance factor in environment. Globally, rising temperatures and increasing human activities have intensified the severity and frequency of fire incidents; research on postfire recovery has inevitably become an important focus for ecologists. In terms of the restoration of burned areas, there are usually two primary approaches: natural recovery and assisted recovery. However, there are very few relevant studies that systematically compared these recovery alternatives suggesting which one is more favorable to the overall restoration of an ecosystem, especially to the soil microbes that function as indispensable components of ecosystems. In this study, the restoration of soil nematode-trapping fungi (NTF) was compared between natural and assisted recovery environments. Results showed that although the NTF community structures differed among the sample sites, the counts and diversity of the NTF communities in the upper and lower soil layers in the natural recovery area were higher than those in the assisted recovery and the unburned control areas. These findings suggests that artificial efforts to help ecosystem recovery after fire produce negative effects on the speed and quality of soil NTF community recovery. Instead, natural recovery appears to be the more suitable land management choice after fire disturbance.