Consistent responses of soil microbial communities to elevated nutrient inputs in grasslands across the globe.

ABSTRACT: Soil microorganisms are critical to ecosystem functioning and the maintenance of soil fertility. However, despite global increases in the inputs of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) to ecosystems due to human activities, we lack a predictive understanding of how microbial communities respond to elevated nutrient inputs across environmental gradients. Here we used high-throughput sequencing of marker genes to elucidate the responses of soil fungal, archaeal, and bacterial communities using an N and P addition experiment replicated at 25 globally distributed grassland sites. We also sequenced metagenomes from a subset of the sites to determine how the functional attributes of bacterial communities change in response to elevated nutrients. Despite strong compositional differences across sites,

SUBMITTER: Leff JW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4568213 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature