Abstract
Soil microorganisms are central to ecosystem functioning, yet how habitat degradation affects their community structure and functional potential in dry Afromontane forests (DAFs) remains poorly understood. This study investigated soil prokaryotic communities across five habitats representing a disturbance gradient in Ethiopian DAFs: Church forest, State forest, Community-managed forest, Shrubland, and Cropland. Using next-generation sequencing, we examined prokaryotic community composition, diversity, assembly processes, and predicted functional profiles. Actinobacteriota and Crenarchaeota were more abundant in less disturbed forests, whereas disturbed habitats showed shifts toward taxa associated with stressed conditions. Alpha diversity was lower in Church and State forests than in shrubland and cropland, indicating environmental filtering and dominance of habitat specialists. Community composition differed significantly among habitats and was associated with soil properties, stand attributes, and indicator trees. Deterministic processes explained most community turnover (81%), indicating strong environmental structuring, with homogeneous selection more evident in forests and mixed deterministic–stochastic processes in disturbed habitats. Predicted functional profiles suggest shifts in nitrogen-related processes, particularly ammonia oxidation and nitrification, although not directly measure microbial activity. Overall, habitat degradation is associated with changes in prokaryotic community structure and assembly, highlighting the importance of conserving intact forests and supporting restoration efforts in dryland ecosystems.
Similar content being viewed by others
Metabarcoding analysis of the soil fungal community to aid the conservation of underexplored church forests in Ethiopia
Response of soil bacteria on habitat-specialization and abundance gradient to different afforestation types
The soil microbiomes of forest ecosystems in Kenya: their diversity and environmental drivers
Acknowledgements
We thank the communities of Tara Gedam Church and the Libo Kemekem District for granting site access. We acknowledge the Daikin Industries Ltd (Japan) for funding, and the Amhara Agricultural Research Institute for field support, and Macrogen Japan Co., Ltd. for sequencing services. We also thank the staff of Gondar Agricultural Research Center for their valuable field assistance.
Funding
This study was funded by the Daikin Industries Ltd. as the Daikin Church Forest Restoration Project in Ethiopia (CFRP), part of the “Forests for the Air” project.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary Material 1 (download DOCX )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Endalamaw, B., Haregeweyn, N., Taniguchi, T. et al. Comparative analysis of soil prokaryotic community structure and function in Ethiopian Church Forests and adjacent habitats.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-57528-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-57528-9
Keywords
- Dry afromontane forest
- Functional potential
- Habitat degradation
- Indicator tree
- Soil prokaryotes
Source: Ecology - nature.com
