Objective  Effects of different treatments of soybean plants on the microbial community in tea plantation soil were studied.

  Method  MiSeq high-throughput sequencing method was employed to analyze the differentiations on the microbial structure and diversity in rhizosphere soils at tea plantations with or without soybeans plants grown on the land and the use of cut plant parts. The treatments applied for the study were USB (removing aboveground parts of planted soybean plants), ASB (ground-mulching with cut plant parts from USB treatment), and WSB (covering soybean growing ground with cut aboveground plant parts).

  Result  The rhizosphere soil of the treatment fields had significantly higher OTU, ACE index, and Chao1 index than that of no-treatment CK (P＜0.05). ASB or WSB significantly increased the fungal OTU, while all 3 treatments significantly raised the fungal ACE index. The Bray clustering and ternary phase plots on the 3 treatments showed a similarity on soil bacterial and fungal structures that had Sphingomonas being the dominant bacteria at 7.53% and positively correlated with Bryobacter. The relative abundance of the fungal communities, on the other hand, significantly differed from that of CK as the dominant species Arnium at 7.21% found only in the treatment soils which was negatively correlated with Penicillium. In addition, the abundance of Condenascus increased significantly.

  Conclusion  The various treatments on the soybean plants at the tea plantations altered the soil microbial community. They increased the diversity and abundance of microbes, especially, WSB significantly enriched the microbial population in in the rhizosphere soil.