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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Julia Cooper
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2021 The Authors. Environmental Microbiology published by Society for Applied Microbiology and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Denitrification causes loss of available nitrogen from soil systems, thereby reducing crop productivity and increasing reliance on agrochemicals. The dynamics of denitrification and denitrifying communities are thought to be altered by land management practices, which affect the physicochemical properties of the soil. In this study, we look at the effects of long-term tillage and fertilization regimes on arable soils following 16 years of treatment in a factorial field trial. By studying the bacterial community composition based on 16S rRNA amplicons, absolute bacterial abundance and diversity of denitrification functional genes (nirK, nirS and nosZ), under conditions of minimum/conventional tillage and organic/synthetic mineral fertilizer, we tested how specific land management histories affect the diversity and distribution of both bacteria and denitrification genes. Bacterial and denitrifier communities were largely unaffected by land management history and clustered predominantly by spatial location, indicating that the variability in bacterial community composition in these arable soils is governed by innate environmental differences and Euclidean distance rather than agricultural management intervention.
Author(s): Moulton-Brown CE, Feng T, Kumar SS, Xu L, Dytham C, Helgason T, Cooper JM, Moir JWB
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Environmental Microbiology
Year: 2022
Volume: 24
Issue: 1
Pages: 298-308
Print publication date: 01/01/2022
Online publication date: 16/12/2021
Acceptance date: 08/12/2021
Date deposited: 12/01/2022
ISSN (print): 1462-2912
ISSN (electronic): 1462-2920
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1462-2920.15873
DOI: 10.1111/1462-2920.15873
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