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 .