Soil bacterial taxonomic diversity is critical to maintaining the plant productivity

Abstract

Soil microbial communities play a central role in driving multiple ecosystem functions and ecological processes that are key to maintaining the plant productivity. However, we lack sound evidence for the linkage between soil microbial diversity and plant productivity, which hinders our ability to predict the consequences of microbial diversity loss for food security under the context of global environmental change. Here, we used the dilution-to-extinction approach to test the consequences of soil microbial diversity loss for the aboveground plant biomass in a glasshouse experiment. Compared with original soils, the bacterial alpha-diversity (Observed operational taxonomic units and Shannon i..