Mineral vs. Organic Amendments: Microbial Community Structure, Activity and Abundance of Agriculturally Relevant Microbes Are Driven by Long-Term Fertilization Strategies

By Davide Francioli, E. Schulz, Guillaume Lentendu, T. Wubet, F. Buscot, Thomas Reitz. Frontiers in Microbiology, 2016

666 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soil management is fundamental to all agricultural systems and fertilization practices have contributed substantially to the impressive increases in food production. Despite the pivotal role of soil microorganisms in agro-ecosystems, we still have a limited understanding of the complex response of the soil microbiota to organic and mineral fertilization in the very long-term. Here, we report the effects of different fertilization regimes (mineral, organic and combined mineral and organic fertilization), carried out for more than a century, on the structure and activity of the soil microbiome. Organic matter content, nutrient concentrations, and microbial biomass carbon were significantly increased by mineral, and even more strongly by organic fertilization. Pyrosequencing revealed significant differences between the structures of bacterial and fungal soil communities associated to each fertilization regime. Organic fertilization increased bacterial diversity, and stimulated microbial groups (Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, and Zygomycota) that are known to prefer nutrient-rich environments, and that are involved in the degradation of complex organic compounds. In contrast, soils not receiving manure harbored distinct microbial communities enriched in oligotrophic organisms adapted to nutrient-limited environments, as Acidobacteria. The fertilization regime also affected the relative abundances of plant beneficial and detrimental microbial taxa, which may influence productivity and stability of the agroecosystem. As expected, the activity of microbial exoenzymes involved in carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous mineralization were enhanced by both types of fertilization. However, in contrast to comparable studies, the highest chitinase and phosphatase activities were observed in the solely mineral fertilized soil. Interestingly, these two enzymes showed also a particular high biomass-specific activities and a strong negative relation with soil pH. As many soil parameters are known to change slowly, the particularity of unchanged fertilization treatments since 1902 allows a profound assessment of linkages between management and abiotic as well as biotic soil parameters. Our study revealed that pH and TOC were the majors, while nitrogen and phosphorous pools were minors, drivers for structure and activity of the soil microbial community. Due to the long-term treatments studied, our findings likely represent permanent and stable, rather than transient, responses of soil microbial communities to fertilization.

Subfields: Ecology, Plant Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16b8482ab600d6832b534037cc841af2087de18f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. Shiwei Guo
2. Yuting Zhang
3. Xiaojun Shi
4. B. Thomas
5. N. Ling
6. Min Wang
7. Chengzhi Zhu
8. Q. Shen

In Plant Science

1. N. Ling
2. Q. Shen
3. Shiwei Guo
4. Min Wang
5. N. Lupwayi

In Soil Science

1. N. Ling
2. Q. Shen
3. N. Lupwayi

Citations in the corpus

• Organic fertilizer enhances rice growth in severe saline–alkali soil by increasing soil bacterial diversity (2021, result): “In the present study, bacterial alpha diversity was higher in the soils subjected to higher frequencies of organic fertilizer application (T2 > T1 > T0, Table 2), which is consistent with previous studies (Berthrong et al., 2013; Francioli et al., 2016).”
• Long-term and legacy effects of manure application on soil microbial community composition (2018, background): “By contrast, organic fertilizers (including manures) usually have positive effects on soil microbial communities (Chinnadurai et al. 2014; Francioli et al. 2016; Hartmann et al. 2015).”
• Bacterial rather than fungal community composition is associated with microbial activities and nutrient-use efficiencies in a paddy soil with short-term organic amendments (2018, background): “The performance of organic amendments on soil microbial community compositions in agricultural soils is well known and has been extensively investigated (Chen et al. 2016; Francioli et al. 2016; Sun et al. 2016; Sun et al. 2015).”