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Publication Details
AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS
SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH
immunology and microbiology
Farm management, not soil microbial diversity, controls nutrient loss from smallholder tropical agriculture
Frontiers in Microbiology, Volume 6, No. MAR, Article 90, Year 2015
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Description
Tropical smallholder agriculture is undergoing rapid transformation in nutrient cycling pathways as international development efforts strongly promote greater use of mineral fertilizers to increase crop yields. These changes in nutrient availability may alter the composition of microbial communities with consequences for rates of biogeochemical processes that control nutrient losses to the environment. Ecological theory suggests that altered microbial diversity will strongly influence processes performed by relatively few microbial taxa, such as denitrification and hence nitrogen losses as nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. Whether this theory helps predict nutrient losses from agriculture depends on the relative effects of microbial community change and increased nutrient availability on ecosystem processes. We find that mineral and organic nutrient addition to smallholder farms in Kenya alters the taxonomic and functional diversity of soil microbes. However, we find that the direct effects of farm management on both denitrification and carbon mineralization are greater than indirect effects through changes in the taxonomic and functional diversity of microbial communities. Changes in functional diversity are strongly coupled to changes in specific functional genes involved in denitrification, suggesting that it is the expression, rather than abundance, of key functional genes that can serve as an indicator of ecosystem process rates. Our results thus suggest that widely used broad summary statistics of microbial diversity based on DNA may be inappropriate for linking microbial communities to ecosystem processes in certain applied settings. Our results also raise doubts about the relative control of microbial composition compared to direct effects of management on nutrient losses in applied settings such as tropical agriculture. © 2015 Wood, Almaraz, Bradford, McGuire, Naeem, Neill, Palm, Tully and Zhou.
Available Materials
https://efashare.b-cdn.net/share/pmc/articles/PMC4396515/bin/Table_1.DOCX
Authors & Co-Authors
Wood, Stephen A.
United States, New York
Columbia University
United States, New York
Earth Institute
Bradford, Mark A.
United States, New Haven
Yale University
McGuire, Krista L.
United States, New York
Columbia University
United States, New York
Barnard College
Naeem, Shahid
United States, New York
Columbia University
Neill, Christopher
United States, Providence
Brown University
United States, Woods Hole
Marine Biological Laboratory
Palm, Cheryl A.
United States, New York
Earth Institute
Tully, Katherine L.
United States, New York
Earth Institute
United States, College Park
University of Maryland, College Park
Zhou, Jizhong
United States, Norman
The University of Oklahoma
United States, Berkeley
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
China, Beijing
Tsinghua University
Statistics
Citations: 25
Authors: 8
Affiliations: 10
Identifiers
Doi:
10.3389/fmicb.2015.00090
ISSN:
1664302X
Research Areas
Environmental
Genetics And Genomics
Study Locations
Kenya