scholarly journals Standing Vegetation Exceeds Soil Microbial Communities in Soil Type Indication: A Procrustes Test of Four Salt-Affected Pastures

Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 1652
Author(s):  
Péter Csontos ◽  
Márton Mucsi ◽  
Péter Ragályi ◽  
Júlia Tamás ◽  
Tibor Kalapos ◽  
...  

Organisms with different life histories are able to act as indicators of different characteristics of their environment. Here, we compared the precision of habitat indication by the vegetation and soil microbial communities in four salt-affected pastures: annual open salt sward, Pannonic Puccinellia limosa hollow, Artemisia saline puszta and grassy saline puszta. Dissimilarity of habitats was evaluated by standardized principal component analysis (PCA) based on four different datasets: catabolic profiles of microbial communities in June (a) and September (b), composition of vascular vegetation (c) and physical and chemical properties of the soil (d). Procrustes analysis was used to quantify the resemblance between pairs of PCA ordinations based on soil properties (d) and various biotic communities (a, b, c). PCA ordination based on vegetation most closely matched the soil data-based ordination, thus vegetation appears to better indicate habitat conditions than soil microbial communities do. For microbial communities, a better agreement with the soil data-based ordination was reached in September than in June. Most probably, the long-lived sedentary habit of perennial plants in these communities requires adaptation to long-term average habitat conditions. In contrast, short-lived soil microbes can quickly follow environmental changes, thus the composition of soil microbial communities better reflect actual soil conditions.

Forests ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Ed-Haun Chang ◽  
Isheng Jason Tsai ◽  
Shih-Hao Jien ◽  
Guanglong Tian ◽  
Chih-Yu Chiu

Biogeographic separation has been an important cause of faunal and floral distribution; however, little is known about the differences in soil microbial communities across islands. In this study, we determined the structure of soil microbial communities by analyzing phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) profiles and comparing enzymatic activities as well as soil physio-chemical properties across five subtropical granite-derived and two tropical volcanic (andesite-derived) islands in Taiwan. Among these islands, soil organic matter, pH, urease, and PLFA biomass were higher in the tropical andesite-derived than subtropical granite-derived islands. Principal component analysis of PLFAs separated these islands into three groups. The activities of soil enzymes such as phosphatase, β-glucosidase, and β-glucosaminidase were positively correlated with soil organic matter and total nitrogen. Redundancy analysis of microbial communities and environmental factors showed that soil parent materials and the climatic difference are critical factors affecting soil organic matter and pH, and consequently the microbial community structure.


Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Songze Wan ◽  
Zhanfeng Liu ◽  
Yuanqi Chen ◽  
Jie Zhao ◽  
Qin Ying ◽  
...  

Soil microorganisms play key roles in ecosystems and respond quickly to environmental changes. Liming and/or understory removal are important forest management practices and have been widely applied to planted forests in humid subtropical and tropical regions of the world. However, few studies have explored the impacts of lime application, understory removal, and their interactive effects on soil microbial communities. We conducted a lime application experiment combined with understory removal in a subtropical Eucalyptus L’Hér. plantation. Responses of soil microbial communities (indicated by phospholipid fatty acids, PLFAs), soil physico-chemical properties, and litter decomposition rate to lime and/or understory removal were measured. Lime application significantly decreased both fungal and bacterial PLFAs, causing declines in total PLFAs. Understory removal reduced the fungal PLFAs but had no effect on the bacterial PLFAs, leading to decreases in the total PLFAs and in the ratio of fungal to bacterial PLFAs. No interaction between lime application and understory removal on soil microbial community compositions was observed. Changes in soil microbial communities caused by lime application were mainly attributed to increases in soil pH and NO3–-N contents, while changes caused by understory removal were mainly due to the indirect effects on soil microclimate and the decreased soil dissolved carbon contents. Furthermore, both lime application and understory removal significantly reduced the litter decomposition rates, which indicates the lime application and understory removal may impact the microbe-mediated soil ecological process. Our results suggest that lime application may not be suitable for the management of subtropical Eucalyptus plantations. Likewise, understory vegetation helps to maintain soil microbial communities and litter decomposition rate; it should not be removed from Eucalyptus plantations.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Johnson ◽  
Joe Ellington ◽  
Wesley Eaton

The goals of this research were to explore alternative agriculture management practices in both greenhouse and field trials that do not require the use of synthetic and/or inorganic nutrient amendments but instead would emulate mechanisms operating in natural ecosystems, between plant and Soil Microbial Communities (SMC), for plant nutrient acquisition and growth. Greenhouse plant-growth trials, implementing a progression of soil conditions with increasing soil carbon (C) (C= 0.14% to 5.3%) and associated SMC population with increasing Fungal to Bacterial ratios (F:B) ( from 0.04 to 3.68), promoted a) increased C partitioning into plant shoot and plant fruit partitions (m=4.41, r2=0.99), b) significant quantities of plant photosynthate, 49%-97% of Total System New C (CTSN), partitioned towards increasing soil C c) four times reduction in soil C respiration (CR) as F:B ratios increased, starting with 44% of initial treatment soil C content respired in bacterial-dominant soils (low F:B), to 11% of soil C content respired in higher fertility fungal-dominant soils (Power Regression, r2=0.90; p=0.003). Plant growth trials in fields managed for increased soil C content and enhanced SMC population and structure (increased F:B) demonstrated: a) dry aboveground biomass production rates (g m-2) of ~1,980 g in soils initiating SMC enhancement (soil C=0.87, F:B= 0.80) with observed potentials of 8,450 g in advanced soils (soil C=7.6%, F:B=4.3) b) a 25-times increase in active soil fungal biomass and a ~7.5 times increase in F:B over a 19 month application period to enhance SMC and c) reduced soil C respiration rates, from 1.25 g C m-2 day-1 in low fertility soils (soil C= 0.6%, F:B= 0.25) with only a doubling of respiration rates to 2.5 g C m-2 day-1 in a high-fertility soil with an enhanced SMC (F:B= 4.3) and >7 times more soil C content (soil C= 7.6%). Enhancing SMC population and F:B structure in a 4.5 year agricultural field study promoted annual average capture and storage of 10.27 metric tons soil C ha-1 year -1 while increasing soil macro-, meso- and micro-nutrient availability offering a robust, cost-effective carbon sequestration mechanism within a more productive and long-term sustainable agriculture management approach.


2020 ◽  
Vol 110 (5) ◽  
pp. 1049-1055
Author(s):  
Emily W. Lankau ◽  
Dianne Xue ◽  
Rachel Christensen ◽  
Amanda J. Gevens ◽  
Richard A. Lankau

Common scab, caused by Streptomyces scabies and related species, is a potato tuber blemish disease that causes reductions in marketable yield worldwide. Evidence of suppression of common scab by indigenous soil microbial populations has been found in several studies. However, we lack a comprehensive understanding of how common scab severity relates functionally to potato varieties, farming systems, soil physical and chemical properties, and soil microbial communities. These factors may affect disease directly or indirectly by affecting one of the other variables. We performed a survey of 30 sampling locations across 12 fields in Wisconsin and used structural equation modeling to disentangle the direct effects of potato market classes, farm management (conventional versus organic), and soil physiochemical properties on common scab severity from their indirect effects mediated through soil bacterial and fungal communities. We found that, although potato market classes affected disease severity directly, the effects of farm management and soil physiochemistry were best explained as indirect, mediated by their impacts on soil bacterial communities. This suggests that evaluating the consequences of specific management practices for soil microbial communities may be useful for understanding disease pressure across fields.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-26
Author(s):  
Feng Sun ◽  
Yuyi Ou ◽  
Qiaojing Ou ◽  
Lingda Zeng ◽  
Hanxia Yu ◽  
...  

Abstract Aims Natural hybridization between invasive and native species, as a form of adaptive evolution, threatens biodiversity worldwide. However, the potential invasive mechanisms of hybrids remain essentially unexplored, especially insights from soil chemical properties and soil microbial communities. Methods In a field experiment, soil microbial community, potassium-solubilizing bacteria, phosphorus-solubilizing bacteria, enzyme activities, and light-saturated photosynthetic rate were measured in invasive Sphagneticola trilobata and its hybrid with native Sphagneticola calendulacea in 2 years. Important Findings In general, soil dissolved organic carbon and the biomass of phosphorus-solubilizing bacteria were significantly higher under the hybrid treatment than S. trilobata and S. calendulacea. However, there were no significant differences in acid phosphatase, total PLFAs, bacterial PLFAs, fungi PLFAs, cellulase, and urase in these treatments. The hybrids had significantly higher light-saturated photosynthetic rate, photosynthetic nitrogen-, phosphorus-, potassium- use efficiencies than the invasive S. trilobata, but no significant difference with S. calendulacea. The total biomass and root biomass of hybrids were higher than S. calendulacea. Our results indicate that the hybrids species have a higher invasive potential than S. calendulacea, which may aggravate the local extinction of S. calendulacea in the future.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Xie ◽  
Kai Zhang ◽  
Xiaoying Wang ◽  
Xiaoxia Zou ◽  
Xiaojun Zhang ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Intercropping has been widely adopted by farmers for it often enhances crop productivity and economic returns; however, the underpinning mechanisms from the perspective of belowground interspecific interactions are only partly understood especially when intercropping under saline soil conditions. By using permeable (100 µm) and impermeable (solid) root barriers in a multi-site field experiment, we aimed to study the impact of root-root interactions on nutrient accumulation, soil microbial communities, crop yield, and economic returns in a peanut/cotton intercropping system under non-saline, secondary-saline, and coastal saline soil conditions. Results The results indicate that intercropping (IC) decreased the peanut pods yield while increased the seed cotton yield, and consequently enhanced the economic returns compared with monoculture of peanut (MP) and cotton (MC). The higher accumulations of nutrients such as nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) were also observed in IC not only in the soil but also in vegetative tissues and reproductive organs. Bacterial community structure analysis under normal growth conditions reveals that IC dramatically altered the soil bacterial abundance composition in both peanut and cotton strips of the top soil whereas the bacterial diversity was barely affected compared with MP and MC. At blossom-needling stage, the metabolic functional features of the bacterial communities such as fatty acid biosynthesis, lipoic acid metabolism, peptidoglycan biosynthesis, and biosynthesis of ansamycins were significantly enriched in MP compared with other treatments. Conversely, these metabolic functional features were dramatically depleted in MP while significantly enriched in IC at podding stage. Permeable root barrier treatments (NC-P and NC-C) counteracted the benefits of IC and the side effects were more pronounced in impermeable treatments (SC-P and SC-C). Conclusion Peanut/cotton intercropping increases crop yield as well as economic returns under non-saline, secondary-saline, and coastal saline soil conditions probably by modulating the soil bacterial abundance composition and accelerating nutrients accumulation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristof Brenzinger ◽  
Katharina Kujala ◽  
Marcus A. Horn ◽  
Gerald Moser ◽  
Cécile Guillet ◽  
...  

Soil Research ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (5) ◽  
pp. 494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohsen Barin ◽  
Nasser Aliasgharzad ◽  
Pål Axel Olsson ◽  
MirHassan Rasouli-Sadaghiani

Lake Urmia in north-western Iran is one of the largest hypersaline lakes in the world, and agricultural production in the surrounding area is limited by soil salinity. We investigated the effects of salinity on belowground microbial communities in soils collected from fields of cultivated onions (Allium cepa L.) and lucerne (Medicago sativa L.), and sites with the native halophyte samphire (Salicornia europaea L.). We tested the hypotheses that salinity reduces microbial biomass and changes the structure of the microbial community. The physical and chemical properties of soil samples were analysed, and phospholipid fatty acids were identified as signatures for various microbial groups. We found that the organic carbon (OC) content was the dominant determinant of microbial biomass. We also found linear relationships between OC and the biomass of various groups of organisms across the wide salinity gradient studied. Salinity, on the other hand, caused changes in the microbial fatty acid composition that indicated adaptation to stress and favoured saprotrophic fungi over bacteria, and Gram-negative bacteria over Gram-positive. Principal component analysis showed that salinity variables and microbial stress indices formed one group, and OC and microbial biomass another. The importance of OC for high microbial biomass in severely stressed soils indicates that OC amendment may be used to mitigate salt stress and as a method of managing saline soils.


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