Effectiveness of ecological rescue for altered soil microbial communities and functions

Abstract

Soil ecosystems worldwide are subjected to marked modifications caused by anthropogenic disturbances and global climate change, resulting in microbial diversity loss and alteration of ecosystem functions. Despite the paucity of studies, restoration ecology provides an appropriate framework for testing the potential of manipulating soil microbial communities for the recovery of ecosystem functioning. We used a reciprocal transplant design in experimentally altered microbial communities to investigate the effectiveness of introducing microbial communities in degraded soil ecosystems to restore N-cycle functioning. Microbial diversity loss resulted in alternative compositional states associated with impaired N-cycle functioning. Here, the addition of complex microbial communities to these altered communities revealed a pivotal role of deterministic community assembly processes. The diversity of some alternative compositional states was successfully increased but without significant restoration of soil N-cycle functioning. However, in the most degraded alternative state, the introduction of new microbial communities caused an overall decrease in phylogenetic diversity and richness. The successful soil colonization by newly introduced species for some compositional states indicates that priority effects could be overridden when attempting to manipulate microbial communities for soil restoration. Altogether, our result showed consistent patterns within restoration treatments with minor idiosyncratic effects. This suggests the predominance of deterministic processes and the predictability of restoration trajectories, which could be used to guide the effective management of microbial community assemblages for ecological restoration of soils

Multi‐omic analyses of exogenous nutrient bag decomposition by the black morel Morchella importuna reveal sustained carbon acquisition and transferring

“…The microbiota in ENB showed low OTU richness as well as low diversity, as compared with soil environmental samples (Tan et al ., ; Calderón et al ., ), composts (Wang et al ., ), water (Thaler et al ., ) and guts (Griffin et al ., ). It means that the decaying ENB hosted a microbiota of limited complexity, comparable to that of seed endophytic microbiota (Barret et al ., ), with a similar feature that their relative abundances of microbial taxa were quite uneven.…”

Temporal dynamics of soil bacterial communities and multifunctionality are more sensitive to introduced plants than to microbial additions in a multicontaminated soil

“…The resource‐based niche theory associates the establishment of potential invaders with local resource availabilities and the ecological traits of resident species (Tilman, ). These results also provide evidence for a habitat filtering process, that is, the nonrandom establishment and colonization of individuals with respect to abiotic local characteristics, and this would suggest that the microbial communities were assembled via deterministic rather than stochastic processes (Calderon et al, ; Placella et al, ).…”

“…Currently, there are a growing number of studies investigating the temporal dynamics of microbial communities in response to environmental contamination, defined as microbial succession (Fierer, Nemergut, Knight, & Craine, ; Jiao, Chen, et al, ; Jiao, Liu, et al, ). Yet we still lack basic knowledge of how microbial species interact and idiosyncratic effects influence biodiversity and ecosystem functioning during microbial community succession with one or more introduced microbial consortia (Calderon et al, ; Harris, ; Laughlin, ).…”

Microbiome Selection Could Spur Next-Generation Plant Breeding Strategies

“…Experiments showing reciprocal soil inoculation or soil transplantation capable of surmounting disease in wheat (Henry, 1931), restore degraded land and giving direction to the type of vegetation grown based on soil inocula (Wubs et al, 2016) and degrade crude oil (Bell et al, 2016) lend credence to the first approach. The work of Calderon et al (2016) on the restoration of the microbial communities responsible for N-cycling in degraded soil using reciprocal soil inoculum suggests that having an understanding of the priority effects along with the relatedness of the established microbial community and the introduced microbial communities could help in better microbial assemblage and successful restoration of target areas. In a recent work of Bai et al (2015), it has been shown that, with some meticulous, systematic and exhaustive isolation of bacteria from phyllosphere and rhizosphere, it is possible to capture majority of the species found reproducibly in their respective natural communities.…”