DISCUSSION
We examined changes in soil bacterial communities with land cover type and light-dark cycles. We investigated these relationships by repeatedly sampling soil at two spatially-paired plots at two South Australian conservation parks (four plots in total) over six weeks. From these soils, we characterised the bacterial community via 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing and generated edaphic physicochemical data (e.g., organic carbon, pH, sulphur, phosphorus). We showed that land cover type strongly affected soil bacterial diversity with soils under native vegetation expressing lower alpha diversity but greater heterogeneity than soils under cleared vegetation. We report time-dependent and site-specific changes in bacterial network complexity and relative abundance of many taxa. Our results demonstrate for the first time that light-dark cycles have subtle yet important effects on the composition of soil bacterial communities in situ .