Conversion of boreal forests to agricultural systems: soil microbial responses along a land-conversion chronosequence.

BACKGROUND: Boreal regions are warming at more than double the global average, creating opportunities for the northward expansion of agriculture. Expanding agricultural production in these regions will involve the conversion of boreal forests to agricultural fields, with cumulative impacts on soil microbial communities and associated biogeochemical cycling processes. Understanding the magnitude or rate of change that will occur with these biological processes will provide information that will enable these regions to be developed in a more sustainable manner, including managing carbon and nitrogen losses. This study, based in the southern boreal region of Canada where agricultural expansion has been occurring for decades, used a paired forest-adjacent agricultural field approach to quantify how soil microbial communities and functions were altered at three different stages post-conversion (< 10, > 10 and < 50, and > 50 years). Soil microbial functional capacity was assessed by quantitative PCR of genes associated with carbon (C), nitrogen, and phosphorous (P) cycling; microbial taxonomic diversity and community structure was assessed by amplicon sequencing. RESULTS: Fungal alpha diversity did not change, but communities shifted from Basidiomycota to Ascomycota dominant within the first decade. Bacterial alpha diversity increased, with Gemmatimonadota groups generally increasing and Actinomycetota groups generally decreasing in agricultural soils. These altered communities led to altered functional capacity. Functional genes associated with nitrification and low molecular weight C cycling potential increased after conversion, while those associated with organic P mineralization potential decreased. Stable increases in most N cycling functions occurred within the first decade, but C cycling functions were still changing 50 years post conversion. CONCLUSIONS: Microbial communities underwent a rapid shift in the first decade, followed by several decades of slower transition until stabilizing 50 years post conversion. Understanding how the microbial communities respond at different stages post-conversion improves our ability to predict C and N losses from emerging boreal agricultural systems, and provides insight into how best to manage these soils in a way that is sustainable at the local level and within a global context.

Biogeography of soil Thaumarchaeota in relation to soil depth and land usage.

Although Thaumarchaeota are important contributors to ammonia oxidation in terrestrial habitats, distributions of ammonia oxidizers along soil depth profiles are poorly understood, especially in relation to distinct land usages. Leveraging the close proximity of forest, field and agricultural plots at the RARE: Charitable Research Reserve, we examined soil thaumarchaeotal biogeography at three different depths (0-15, 15-30 and 30-45 cm) from plots within areas of contrasting land usage. Data from high-throughput sequencing of thaumarchaeotal 16S rRNA gene sequences demonstrated that OTU richness was affected significantly by depth and land-use type. Specifically, thaumarchaeotal diversity was higher in soils from forest sites than from field sites, and lower within 0-15 cm soils than either 15-30 cm or 30-45 cm soils. Soil land-use type influenced the relative abundance of the Soil Crenarchaeota Group (SCG), with a lower relative abundance of SCG in forest sites compared to field sites. At the OTU level, thaumarchaeotal communities changed with increasing soil depth for agricultural soils, in contrast to homogeneous depth profiles generated from forest site samples. Soil pH was the strongest factor impacting thaumarchaeotal community composition and, importantly, the evenness of archaeal taxa. Nitrogen, carbon and soil texture shaped thaumarchaeotal community composition among field site samples.

Depth-dependent influence of different land-use systems on bacterial biogeography.

Despite progress in understanding microbial biogeography of surface soils, few studies have investigated depth-dependent distributions of terrestrial microorganisms in subsoils. We leveraged high-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA genes obtained from soils collected from the RARE: Charitable Research Reserve (Cambridge, ON, Canada) to assess the influence of depth on bacterial communities across various land-use types. Although bacterial communities were strongly influenced by depth across all sites, the magnitude of this influence was variable and demonstrated that land-use attributes also played a significant role in shaping soil bacterial communities. Soil pH exhibited a large gradient across samples and strongly influenced shifts in bacterial communities with depth and across different land-use systems, especially considering that physicochemical conditions showed generally consistent trends with depth. We observed significant (p ≤ 0.001) and strongly correlated taxa with depth and pH, with a strong predominance of positively depth-correlated OTUs without cultured representatives. These findings highlight the importance of depth in soil biogeographical surveys and that subsurface soils harbour understudied bacterial members with potentially unique and important functions in deeper soil horizons that remain to be characterized.