Fungi and bacteria populations, urease and phosphatase activities and various physico chemical characteristics of the disturbed and undisturbed forest soils were investigated for a period of one year. We found that fungal and bacterial populations exhibited almost a similar trend of monthly variations in the soils of the disturbed and undisturbed forest stands during the study period. The soil of the undisturbed forest stand harbored higher fungal and bacterial populations as compared to that of the disturbed forest stand. It was observed that the urease and phosphatase activities were slightly higher in the disturbed forest stand than that in the undisturbed forest stand. The urease activity was found to be maximum in the month of June and minimum in the month of January in both the forest stands, whereas, in the case of phosphatase activity the maximum activity was observed in the month of July and minimum in the month of November. Fungal population showed a positive significant correlation with soil temperature (P ≤ 0.01), moisture content (P ≤ 0.01), organic carbon (P ≤ 0.05), available phosphorus (P ≤ 0.05) and exchangeable potassium (P ≤ 0.01) and negatively significant with pH (P ≤ 0.05) in both the forest stands, however, a significant positive correlation was found between the fungal population and total nitrogen (P ≤ 0.05) in undisturbed forest stand only. The one way analysis of variation of fungal, bacterial populations and phosphatase activity showed significant variation (P ≤ 0.05) at the three different depths between the two study sites.
Keywords
Activities, Bacteria, Disturbed, Enzymes, Forest, Fungi, Phosphatase, Undisturbed, Urease
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