Changes in soil microbial community composition and related functions can alter the associated services 5. Soil microbes are involved in the decomposition of soil organic matter, regulate carbon stocks and nutrient cycling, and facilitate plant nutrient uptake 3, 4. Soil biota plays an important role in contributing to provide ecosystem services such as food production, climate regulation and pest control 1, 2. We propose guidelines for environmental policy actions and argue that taxonomical and functional diversity should be considered simultaneously for monitoring purposes. Spatial patterns of microbial communities and predicted functions are best explained when interactions among the major determinants (vegetation cover, climate, soil properties) are considered. Highly-disturbed environments contain significantly more bacterial chemoheterotrophs, harbour a higher proportion of fungal plant pathogens and saprotrophs, and have less beneficial fungal plant symbionts compared to woodlands and extensively-managed grasslands. We found the lowest bacterial and fungal diversity in less-disturbed environments (woodlands) compared to grasslands and highly-disturbed environments (croplands).
We analysed microbial biodiversity metrics and distribution of potential functional groups along a gradient of increasing land-use perturbation, detecting over 79,000 bacterial and 25,000 fungal OTUs in 715 sites across 24 European countries. Factors driving microbial community composition and diversity are well established but the relationship with microbial functioning is poorly understood, especially at large scales.
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