Prescribed fire selects for a pyrophilous soil subcommunity in a northern California mixed conifer forest

ABSTRACT Low intensity prescribed fire is a critical strategy for mitigating the effects of catastrophic wildfires. The above-ground response to fire has been well-documented, including many ecosystem benefits associated with prescribed burning, but fewer studies have directly addressed the effect of prescribed fire on soil organisms. We aimed to understand how soil microbial communities respond to prescribed fire and to determine the ecological processes driving their dynamics. We extensively sampled four plots for 17 months in a mixed conifer forest in northern California, USA; immediately following a low-intensity prescribed fire, a higher-intensity prescribed fire, and two no-burn control plots. We found that prescribed fire significantly altered the community structure for both fungi (ITS) and bacteria (16S), which was sustained throughout the time-series. By comparing our community profiling results with a model of neutral community assembly, we found that the presence of most taxa across all experimental conditions could be explained by neutral processes. However, combining threshold indicator taxa analysis and correlation network analysis with the neutral model identified a cohort of taxa that responded deterministically to prescribed fire. The subcommunity identified through this series of analyses includes both known and new pyrophilous taxa. Beyond this, our analyses revealed network modules within postfire communities which were responsive to fire-intensity. Taken together, these results lay the foundation for building a process-driven understanding of microbial community assembly in the context of the classical disturbance regime of fire.