Summary
This long-term field study leverages a century-old grassland fertilisation experiment to investigate how sustained nutrient management shapes the predictability of soil microbial community succession. The authors infer that intensive fertilisation reduces the stochasticity governing community assembly, suggesting that nutrient-enriched soils favour more deterministic, repeatable patterns of microbial succession compared to unfertilised controls. The work contributes to understanding how agricultural management alters the mechanistic drivers of soil microbial diversity and ecosystem functioning.
UK applicability
Directly applicable to UK grassland management, given that the study appears to draw on long-term UK experimental grassland plots (as suggested by co-author affiliations at research institutions such as Rothamsted). Findings may inform decisions on fertiliser use intensity and its effects on soil microbiome resilience and productivity in UK pasture and meadow systems.
Key measures
Microbial community composition (as suggested by molecular profiling); temporal succession patterns; stochasticity indices quantifying the role of deterministic vs. stochastic processes in community assembly
Outcomes reported
The study examined how a century of differential fertilisation regimes influenced the temporal dynamics and predictability of grassland microbial community succession. It measured changes in microbial community composition and the degree of stochasticity (randomness) governing community assembly over time.
Topic tags
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