Microbial succession in West African secondary forests: guild-specific internal stabilisation with no detectable convergence toward old-growth reference states
- 1CIRAD
Abstract
Secondary forest succession following agricultural abandonment is a dominant land-use transition across the tropics, yet whether soil microbial communities recover toward old-growth forest reference states remains poorly understood, particularly in West Africa. Here, we investigated the successional dynamics of bacterial and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal communities along post-agricultural chronosequences spanning 1 to 43 years across six classified forests in Cote d'Ivoire, using Bayesian hierarchical models applied to amplicon sequencing data. Both guilds attained moderate to high alpha diversity within the first decade of succession; AM fungal diversity showed moderate evidence of age-related increase thereafter while bacterial diversity showed no directional trend. Pairwise turnover analyses revealed progressive internal convergence in AM fungal communities with plots farther apart in successional time becoming more compositionally similar, while bacterial communities showed only a weak and uncertain tendency in the same direction. Beta-dispersion modelling further indicated progressive within-forest homogenisation of AM fungal communities across abundance-weighted metrics, while bacterial assemblages showed no such stabilisation. Despite this internal convergence, compositional distances to old-growth reference plots remained persistently high for both guilds throughout the chronosequence, with no statistical evidence of recovery toward old-growth states across any dissimilarity metric or guild within the 40-year window. Indicator species analysis identified no robust stage-specific taxa after correction for multiple testing. These results indicate that microbial succession in post-agricultural West African forests is characterised by rapid early reorganisation followed by stabilisation into site-specific assemblages that remain persistently distinct from old-growth reference communities. This outcome challenges the direct application of classical vegetation successional theory to soil microbiomes and indicates that no detectable recovery toward old-growth microbial community states was observed within the 40-year chronosequence.
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BibTeX
@misc{ebou2026microbial,
title = {{Microbial succession in West African secondary forests: guild-specific internal stabilisation with no detectable convergence toward old-growth reference states}},
author = {A. Ebou and B. H. K. Amani and G.-P. T. Toure and E. Ehouman and S. V. Zaoui and A. D. Toure and S. M. Ndiaye and S. C. Yapo and A. B. Koffi and R. K. Fossou and R. Aussenac and A. Zeze and D. K. KOUA and B. Herault},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = jun,
doi = {10.64898/2026.06.19.733386},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.19.733386v3},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Microbial succession in West African secondary forests: guild-specific internal stabilisation with no detectable convergence toward old-growth reference states
AU - A. Ebou
AU - B. H. K. Amani
AU - G.-P. T. Toure
AU - E. Ehouman
AU - S. V. Zaoui
AU - A. D. Toure
AU - S. M. Ndiaye
AU - S. C. Yapo
AU - A. B. Koffi
AU - R. K. Fossou
AU - R. Aussenac
AU - A. Zeze
AU - D. K. KOUA
AU - B. Herault
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/06/19
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.06.19.733386
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.19.733386v3
AB - Secondary forest succession following agricultural abandonment is a dominant land-use transition across the tropics, yet whether soil microbial communities recover toward old-growth forest reference states remains poorly understood, particularly in West Africa. Here, we investigated the successional dynamics of bacterial and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal communities along post-agricultural chronosequences spanning 1 to 43 years across six classified forests in Cote d'Ivoire, using Bayesian hierarchical models applied to amplicon sequencing data. Both guilds attained moderate to high alpha diversity within the first decade of succession; AM fungal diversity showed moderate evidence of age-related increase thereafter while bacterial diversity showed no directional trend. Pairwise turnover analyses revealed progressive internal convergence in AM fungal communities with plots farther apart in successional time becoming more compositionally similar, while bacterial communities showed only a weak and uncertain tendency in the same direction. Beta-dispersion modelling further indicated progressive within-forest homogenisation of AM fungal communities across abundance-weighted metrics, while bacterial assemblages showed no such stabilisation. Despite this internal convergence, compositional distances to old-growth reference plots remained persistently high for both guilds throughout the chronosequence, with no statistical evidence of recovery toward old-growth states across any dissimilarity metric or guild within the 40-year window. Indicator species analysis identified no robust stage-specific taxa after correction for multiple testing. These results indicate that microbial succession in post-agricultural West African forests is characterised by rapid early reorganisation followed by stabilisation into site-specific assemblages that remain persistently distinct from old-growth reference communities. This outcome challenges the direct application of classical vegetation successional theory to soil microbiomes and indicates that no detectable recovery toward old-growth microbial community states was observed within the 40-year chronosequence.
ER -