For my post-doctoral research project in the Menalled lab in 2016/2017, I was investigating the effect of farming system, weed competition, and season, on wheat production and soil bacteria during a growing season in Montana. All of these represent potentially stressful conditions, which can hamper plant growth, as well as whether and how they will interact with soil microbial communities. In particular, the element of time is missing from many studies on soil microbial ecology, often because of cost. Because plant-microbial interactions change depending on the needs of the plant, we wondered if soil communities would change as the wheat (and weeds) grew, matured, and then senesced (aged and died).
The soil is then put in sterile containers until analysis. 
Weeds are harvested and packed by bag for drying and weighing. 
Bags of dried wheat hanging out in my office.
This publication is part of a series, from data collected from a long-term farming experiment in Bozeman, MT, including:
- Agroecosystem resilience is modified by management system via plant soil feedbacks.
- Dryland cropping systems, weed communities, and disease status modulate the effect of climate conditions on wheat soil bacterial communities.
- Weed communities and wheat yield are modified by cropping systems and climate conditions. In review.
Ishaq, S.L., Seipel, T., Yeoman, C.J., Menalled, F.D. 2020. Soil bacterial communities of wheat vary across the growing season and among dryland farming systems. Geoderma 358:113989. Article.
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.