Soil Properties Drive Microbial Community Structure in a Large Scale Transect in South Eastern Australia.

ABSTRACT: Soil microbial communities directly affect soil functionality through their roles in the cycling of soil nutrients and carbon storage. Microbial communities vary substantially in space and time, between soil types and under different land management. The mechanisms that control the spatial distributions of soil microbes are largely unknown as we have not been able to adequately upscale a detailed analysis of the microbiome in a few grams of soil to that of a catchment, region or continent. Here we reveal that soil microbes along a 1000 km transect have unique spatial structures that are governed mainly by soil properties. The soil microbial community assessed using Phospholipid Fatty Acids showed a strong gradient along the latitude gradient across New South Wales, Australia. We found that

SUBMITTER: Xue PP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6078944 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature