Functional diversity of soil microbial communities increases with ecosystem development.

ABSTRACT: Land abandonment is the single largest process of land-use change in the Global North driving succession and afforestation at continental scales, but assessing its impacts on soil microbial communities remains a challenge. Here, we establish a nationwide successional gradient of paired grassland and forest sites to track developments in microbial structure and functioning following land abandonment and gradual land-use change to forests. We show that microbes generally respond through threshold dynamics, leading to increasing functional but decreasing taxonomic diversity. Succession also entailed specialization of microbial nutrient (C-N-P) cycling genetic repertoires while decreasing genetic redundancy. This highlights a putative trade-off between two desirable ecosystem properties: funct

SUBMITTER: Sveen TR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12644890 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature