Deforestation has garnered negative connotations due to its association with climate change and urban development. While deforestation does lead to problems with ecosystem diversity, desertification has far more lasting impacts. This phenomenon happens when an ecosystem loses its vegetation, soil health, and even its climate, becoming a new desert that can’t restore itself without outside assistance. Desertification due to urbanization, industrial farming, and mining has become a major ecological issue worldwide that has destroyed ecosystem stability.

While reforestation efforts have been made to return vegetation to desertified areas, ecologists have only focused on plant diversity and soil content. However, plants are the part of the ecosystem that we can see with the naked eye. The reality is that an ecosystem thrives from the diversity and interactions of plants, animals, and the bacteria and fungi in soil. Ecologists are now looking into the soil bacteria and fungi after reforestation efforts to see how restoration, the process of healing the ecosystem from plant life to soil health, affects them and predicts the restored environment's long-term health. One group has reported that restoring a dune-covered desertified area in China increased the diversity of plants and soil bacteria but not soil fungi. Despite the lack of diversity in soil fungi, the chemical components of the soil showed healthy trends that laid the foundation for the complete recovery of the ecosystem.

The bacteria and fungi within the soil are valuable for the health of an ecosystem. They are the decomposers that break down organic matter to recycle nutrients and provide some structural components to the soil. When organic matter is broken down, it releases elements like carbon and nitrogen that plants and microbes use for energy and growth. Mycorrhiza fungi form symbiotic relationships with plants to increase nutrient absorption through plant roots, and symbiotic bacteria convert elements like nitrogen into forms that a plant uses to grow. Because of these symbiotic relationships, the diversity of plant species in an ecosystem shapes the soil bacteria and fungi communities. Environmental factors also influence the diversity of soil microbes, making their interactions within the ecosystem highly complex and valuable. So, they must be considered when an ecosystem is restored after desertification, as they can establish a permanent, resilient, and sustainable new ecosystem.

After reforestation, the research team in China found that plant diversity and biomass increased after the initial planting. With new plant growth, the soil changed from loose and arid to stronger, stable, and nutritious. The litter created by the new plants gave soil bacteria and fungi food for decomposition, improving nutrient recycling and increasing the overall amount of nutrients available for the plants. Despite this abundance of resources, bacterial and fungal diversity within the soil was affected differently.

Soil bacterial diversity increased significantly after restoration, but fungal diversity declined. It is believed that the introduction of new plants created new niches and microenvironments that favored more bacterial species than fungi, but the end result is still a healthier soil to sustain the new ecosystem. The team believes the skew towards bacteria diversity over fungi represents a change in the microbes' ecological roles during the process of creating dunes. For their study, the team looked at dunes at two points of the dune life cycle: mobile and fixed. Mobile dunes are younger and have no vegetation, while fixed dunes have matured and been anchored by vast vegetation. Fixed dunes also have more nutritious soil due to the plant growth, soil bacteria, and soil fungi present.

Mobile dunes are unstable environments, so bacteria have better luck surviving these conditions with and without plants, thus explaining why there were more bacterial species after restoration. Fungi require more stable environments with consistent sources of food and consistent conditions present. Fixed dunes provided this stability, explaining why the research team did not find as many fungal species in different dune types. With limited space, fungi would compete, and only the best-suited and most abundant would win. Given more time, the plants and restored soil may improve the fungal diversity as fungi as conditions improve and support more fungal diversity.

As the restored ecosystem persists, more plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals return to improve its diversity and sustainability. With desertification and deforestation becoming a huge problem for ecosystems, restoration efforts are being made to heal affected environments and return them to their original abundance. This abundance is only possible thanks to the diversity of the plants above and the microbes below. As more restoration projects are underway, ecologists are looking into the diversity and health of soil microbes due to their complex and intertwined relationships with the plants of an ecosystem. If the microbes are healthy, they can cement a restored ecosystem that will persist for years to come.