After several years of bouncing through internal and external review, I’m pleased to announce that the first microbes paper out of the Montana State University Fort Ellis project has been published in Geoderma! The Fort Ellis research has encompassed multiple labs, projects, and many personnel, as it was a large collaboration looking at the effect of different farming systems on biodiversity at the macro (plant), mini (insect), and micro (-be) levels. Spanning multiple years, this project has been a massive undertaking that I briefly participated in but anticipate getting four publications out of (two more are in preparation).
I previously presented this work at the 2017 Ecological Society of America (ESA) conference (poster: Ishaq et al ESA 2017 poster). And this field soil was the “soil probiotic” that was used in the follow-up greenhouse trial that I ran which was also published this year.
Soil bacterial communities of wheat vary across the growing season and among dryland farming systems.
Ishaq, S.L., Seipel, T., Yeoman, C.J., Menalled, F.D. 2020. Geoderma 358:113989.
Abstract
Despite knowledge that management practices, seasonality, and plant phenology impact soil microbiota; farming system effects on soil microbiota are not often evaluated across the growing season. We assessed the bacterial diversity in soil around wheat roots through the spring and summer of 2016 in winter wheat (Triticum aestivium L.) in Montana, USA, from three contrasting farming systems: a chemically-managed no-tillage system, and two USDA-certified organic systems in their fourth year, one including tillage and one where sheep grazing partially offsets tillage frequency. Bacterial richness (range 605 – 1174 OTUs) and evenness (range 0.80 – 0.92) peaked in early June and dropped by late July (range 92 – 1190, 0.62-0.92, respectively), but was not different by farming systems. Organic tilled plots contained more putative nitrogen-fixing bacterial genera than the other two systems. Bacterial community similarities were significantly altered by sampling date, minimum and maximum temperature at sampling, bacterial abundance at date of sampling, total weed richness, and coverage of Taraxacum officinale, Lamium ampleuxicaule, and Thlaspi arvense. This study highlights that weed diversity, season, and farming management system all influence soil microbial communities. Local environmental conditions will strongly condition any practical applications aimed at improving soil diversity, especially in semi-arid regions where abiotic stress and seasonal variability in temperature and water availability drive primary production. Thus, it is critical to incorporate or address seasonality in soil sampling for microbial diversity.