Plant community and soil conditions individually affect soil microbial community assembly in experimental mesocosms.

ABSTRACT: Soils harbor large, diverse microbial communities critical for local and global ecosystem functioning that are controlled by multiple and poorly understood processes. In particular, while there is observational evidence of relationships between both biotic and abiotic conditions and microbial composition and diversity, there have been few experimental tests to determine the relative importance of these two sets of factors at local scales. Here, we report the results of a fully factorial experiment manipulating soil conditions and plant cover on old-field mesocosms across a latitudinal gradient. The largest contributor to beta diversity was site-to-site variation, but, having corrected for that, we observed significant effects of both plant and soil treatments on microbial composition. Sepa

SUBMITTER: Reese AT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5773302 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature