Article Seasonal Stabilities of Soil Nematode Communities and Their Relationships with Environmental Factors in Different Temperate Forest Types on the Chinese Loess Plateau Na Huo 1, Shiwei Zhao 1,2,3,*, Jinghua Huang 2,3, Dezhou Geng 1, Nan Wang 1 and Panpan Yang 3 1 College of Natural Resources and Environment, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China;
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[email protected] Abstract: The bottom-up effects of vegetation have been documented to be strong drivers of the soil food web structure and functioning in temperate forests. However, how the forest type affects the stability of the soil food web is not well known. In the Ziwuling forest region of the Loess Plateau, we selected three typical forests, Pinus tabuliformis Carrière (PT), Betula platyphylla Sukaczev (BP), and Quercus liaotungensis Koidz. (QL), to investigate the soil nematode community characteristics in the dry (April) and rainy (August) season, and analyzed their relationships with the soil properties. The results showed that the characteristics of the soil nematode communities and their seasonal variations Citation: Huo, N.; Zhao, S.; Huang, differed markedly among the forest types. Compared to P. tabuliformis (PT), the B. platyphylla (BP) and J.; Geng, D.; Wang, N.; Yang, P.