Soil Bacterial Assemblage Across a Production Landscape: Agriculture Increases Diversity While Revegetation Recovers Community Composition
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Date
2023
Authors
Mason, A.R.G.
Cavagnaro, T.R.
Guerin, G.R.
Lowe, A.J.
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Microbial Ecology, 2023; 85(3):1098-1112
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A. R. G. Mason, T. R. Cavagnaro, G. R. Guerin, A. J. Lowe
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Abstract
Aboveground ecological impacts associated with agricultural land use change are evident as natural plant communities are replaced with managed production systems. These impacts have been extensively studied, unlike those belowground, which remain poorly understood. Soil bacteria are good candidates to monitor belowground ecological dynamics due to their prevalence within the soil system and ability to survive under harsh and changing conditions. Here, we use soil physicochemical assessment and 16S rRNA gene sequencing to investigate the soil physical and bacterial assemblage changes across a mixeduse agricultural landscape. We assess soil from remnant vegetation (Eucalyptus mallee), new and old vineyards, old pasture, and recently revegetated areas. Elevated concentrations of nitrogen (NO3 −) and plant-available (Colwell) phosphorus were identifed in the managed vineyard systems, highlighting the impact of agricultural inputs on soil nutrition. Alpha diversity comparison revealed a signifcant diference between the remnant mallee vegetation and the vineyard systems, with vineyards supporting highest bacterial diversity. Bacterial community composition of recently revegetated areas was similar to remnant vegetation systems, suggesting that bacterial communities can respond quickly to aboveground changes, and that actions taken to restore native plant communities may also act to recover natural microbial communities, with implications for soil and plant health. Findings here suggest that agriculture may disrupt the correlation between above- and belowground diversities by altering the natural processes that otherwise govern this relationship (e.g. disturbance, plant production, diversity of inputs), leading to the promotion of belowground microbial diversity in agricultural systems.
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© The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.