Shifting Cyanobacterial Diversity in Response to Agricultural Soils Associated with Dust Emission

Abstract

Dust emission to the atmosphere from wind‐eroded soils has many environmental impacts, including soil degradation and air pollution. Various agricultural land uses alter the topsoil properties and thus affect dust particle characteristics as well as loading of biological components into the air. In the present work, the richness and abundance of bacterial communities in topsoils of semiarid loess that are associated with dust emissions were studied by high throughput sequencing methods and were found to be affected by land uses: conventional agriculture, organic agriculture alternating with grazing, uncontrolled grazing activities and natural nondisturbed soil. Moreover, bacterial diversity was shown to be influenced by the contents of sand, CaCO3 and particulate matter in the topsoil. Of all bacteria taxa detected, cyanobacteria were found to be most strongly influenced by land use: Natural and grazing lands were highly abundant with cyanobacterial reads (about 33%), whereas conventional agriculture lands and organic agriculture lands alternating with grazing contained only 7% cyanobacteria. When examining macro‐aggregates in two soils (natural and grazing), approximately 44% of reads were found to be affiliated to cyanobacteria, whereas in micro‐aggregates, their concentration decreased to about 11%. Intensive agricultural use leads to a reduction in soil aggregation and significantly decreases cyanobacteria abundance, in turn increasing dust emission potential and loss of topsoil materials to the atmosphere. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Origin-Dependent Variations in the Atmospheric Microbiome Community in Eastern Mediterranean Dust Storms

“…52 The relative abundance of Proteobacteria was also shown to increase in agricultural Negev soils. 54 Moreover, the abundance of γproteobacteria increased in N-amended soils. 55 Collectively, these data support the notion that fertilized agricultural soil microbiomes harbor more active, r-strategist (copiotrophic) We therefore suggest that the increasing influence of the local dust microbiome was related to the observed change in wind direction on the last day of the Saudi Arabian storm (Table 3).…”

“…51,52 Previous studies have demonstrated that in Egyptian and Negev desert soils that were claimed for agriculture, the relative abundance of this phylum decreased, while that of Firmicutes increased, compared with pristine non-agricultural desert soils. 53,54 Firmicutes have also been shown to be negatively correlated with the precipitation gradient in Israel, exhibiting an increased relative abundance in arid and semiarid Negev soils compared with soils under Mediterranean climate. 52 The relative abundance of Proteobacteria was also shown to increase in agricultural Negev soils.…”

Soil Erosion by Wind and Dust Emission in Semi-Arid Soils Due to Agricultural Activities

“…Its loamy texture is composed mostly of silt and clay particles (<50 µm), but also of fine to medium sand particles (50-200 µm). In recent years, the loess soils in the northern Negev have been subjected to the strain of increased human pressure and dust emission [28].…”

Mitochondria‐mediated oxidative stress induced by desert dust in rat alveolar macrophages

“…Total of 423,762 bacterial sequence reads were recovered and subjected to the software package QIIME, leaving a total of 388,217 bacterial reads after chimeric and primer sequences removal and 14,411–25,613 bacterial reads for each sample. Sequence data were clustered into operational taxonomic units (OTU) at 97% similarity and classified with the nonredundant Greengenes reference OTU build (version 13.8; 97% similarity database; 99,322 sequences [ Katra et al ., ].…”