Periodic waterlogging consistently shapes agricultural soil microbiomes by promoting specific taxa

Autor: Thomas Walter, Anja Gramlich, Florian Gschwend, Kilian Aregger, Franco Widmer
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Applied Soil Ecology. 155:103623
ISSN: 0929-1393
Popis: Periodic waterlogging of soils affects ecosystem services of agricultural fields such as reducing crop productivity. It also creates a highly dynamic habitat for soil organisms determined by drying-rewetting cycles and waterlogged phases. However, soil microbial diversity in periodically waterlogged agricultural fields is poorly studied. Using metabarcoding, we analyzed responses of soil bacterial and fungal communities to periodic waterlogging in seven agricultural fields. Each field had a well-drained and a periodically waterlogged area and was cultivated with winter wheat or sugar beet, which allowed assessing crop-independent effects. Physico-chemical soil properties were similar between periodically waterlogged and drained areas, which contrasted with the unambiguous distinction of the water regimes based on soil microbial community structures. Furthermore, few OTUs drove community shifts and higher indicator values for periodic waterlogging were found at the OTU- as compared to the phylum-level. Among the bacterial OTUs 95 displayed a positive and 54 a negative response to periodic waterlogging, while the opposite trend was found for fungi, with 18 positively and 4 negatively responding OTUs. Bacterial OTUs, which responded positively to periodic waterlogging were derived from taxa with an anaerobic lifestyle and the strongest response was found for OTUs assigned to Anaerolineaceae. Therefore, limited oxygen availability was identified as the main constraining factor of soil microbial communities in periodically waterlogged agricultural fields. Finally, the comparison between soil properties and soil microbial communities in discriminating different soils, i.e., water regimes, and crops, underlines the potential of microbial metabarcoding for use in soil quality assessment by complementing soil physico-chemical analyses.
Databáze: OpenAIRE