Cropping systems impact changes in soil fungal, but not prokaryote, alpha-diversity and community composition stability over a growing season in a long-term field trial

Abstract

Resistance is the capacity for a community to remain unchanged, and resilience the capacity to return to an original state, in response to disturbance. Increasing species richness may increase both dynamics. In a long-term agricultural field experiment incorporating conventional (CON), integrated (INT), conservation (CA) and organic (ORG) cropping systems, the effects of crop harvest and fallow period on the disturbance of prokaryote, fungal and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) communities were investigated. It was hypothesised that: 1) change in composition observed over time due to disturbance differs between systems; 2) species-rich prokaryote communities demonstrate greater resistance and resilience than speciespoor AMF; 3) key functional groups are more stable under systems that promote richness. Prokaryote community structure shifted over the growing season, forming distinct saprotroph-and rhizosphere-dominated communities over-winter and under mature crops, respectively. Management did not alter their response to disturbance, and they demonstrated the highest resistance/resilience. Fungal richness and resistance/resilience was highest under CA with a unique composition. AMF richness and resistance/resilience was lowest under CON with a fractured composition.Prokaryote plant-growth promoters and saprotrophs, but not ammonia oxidisers and methylotrophs, were stable functional groups. Diverse, cosmopolitan soil fungal genera were stable, but most were not. Glomus AMF were stable, while most other genera were stable under CA and ORG. These results demonstrate that practices promoting richness increase the stability of soil fungal communities, while prokaryote communities are more dynamic in structure. This may have consequences for the stability of fungal-and specific prokaryote-driven functions in response to crop harvest. 2015; Banerjee et al., 2019) and shift communities to favour Proteobacteria over

Organic mulch can suppress litchi downy blight through modification of soil microbial community structure and functional potentials

“…As one important management practice in agricultural production, organic mulch is mainly used for soil improvement and environmental protection. The application of mulch derived from plant residues could not only increase water infiltration [ 11 ], prevent soil nutrient loss [ 12 ] and suppress weed germination [ 13 ], but also control crop pests and diseases [ 14 , 15 ] and increase the biodiversity of soil microecosystem [ 16 ]. Previous studies have reported strong changes in richness and diversity of soil microbial community regulated by organic mulch in vegetable and tea plantation [ 17 , 18 ].…”

Biogeography and ecological functions of root‐associated and soil fungi of Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica across different afforestation areas in desertified Northern China

“…Representing geographical location, climate conditions made a great contribution to varying fungal diversity and shaped the fungal community composition of Mongolian pine in the desert ecosystem (Figure 5; Figure 6; Table 3; Figure S2; Table S9). A relatively high microbial alpha diversity plays a positive role in maintaining vegetation growth in terrestrial ecosystems, which suggests that the conditions of habitat are better with unstrained soils (Delgado‐Baquerizo et al, 2016; Finn et al, 2021). In general, the ecological stability of natural forests is stronger than that of plantations because natural forests have diverse age groups and rich understorey vegetation (Guo & Ren, 2014).…”

Methane-derived carbon flow through host-virus trophic networks in soil

“…16S rRNA genes were amplified using primers 515F/806R (Walters et al, 2015) followed by library preparation and sequencing on an Illumina MiSeq sequencer as previously described (Finn et al, 2020). Reads with a quality score < 20 and length < 100 bp were discarded using FASTX-Toolkit v0.0.13 (http://hannonlab.cshl.edu/fastx_toolkit/).…”