Impact of agricultural practices on soil microbial communities in Belgium

The use of fertilizers in agricultural soils is becoming a real environmental issue (an obvious example is eutrophication caused by leaching of phosphorus and nitrates). Much research has focused on finding ways to reduce the use of chemicals, and investigating microbial life may lead to solutions. We know that bacteria and fungi are deeply involved in nutrient cycles. Recently the emergence of massive parallel sequencing has enabled us to realize that microbial diversity is huger than we expected. With such a tool it should be possible to study how soil management practices affect the microbial diversity of agricultural soils. A few such studies have been conducted, most of them focusing on bacteria. For Belgium in particular, there is a lack of data on this topic. Here the aim was to see how residue management and tillage practices affect communities of both bacteria and fungi in Belgian agricultural soils. For this we used 454 pyrosequencing of 16S bacterial and 28S fungal rRNA genes. Soil samples came from an experiment in which faba beans were grown with four soil management practices (tillage and no tillage, with and without crop residues), each repeated four times in a Latin square. Several chemical and physical characteristics were measured on each sample. The results show that fungi and bacteria are both impacted by Tillage practices. The main soil drivers are Magnesium and Phosphorus for Fungi communities, and Phosphorus and Potassium for bacteria communities. Finally, the fungi variance observed between plots is explained at 38% by Tillage, Magnesium and phosphorus. And the bacteria variance is explained at 28% by Tillage, Phosphorus and Potassium.