There has been an increasing emphasis placed on understanding microbial c, in order to enable the patterns and processes governing the spatial distribution of soil microbiota to be determined. Due to current food security issues, this is particularly important within agricultural systems given the fundamental role microorganisms play in the maintenance of crop health and productivity. With evidence in favour of both ubiquity and endemism, complicated by systems, scales and communities, there is a need to address the question of microbial biogeography within a single system. A range of field experimental resources were used to investigate factors controlling the assembly of soil microbial communities. Microorganisms across all three domains of life demonstrated spatial scaling, in which there was no single universal driver. Land-use management was an important driver of eukaryote distribution, but also impacted the drivers of bacterial and eukaryote taxa groups under land-use practice. When considering microbial community structure, a pan microbial relationship between abundance and distribution was shown for the first time, across all microbial groups. Furthermore, partitioning microbial communities into common and rare groups provided information on the processes operating on the community and highlighted the importance of land-use management for shaping the structure of communities. Finally, a case study on plasmodiophorids increased current estimates of plasmodiophorid diversity in the soil. Also different communities were associated with the rhizosphere compared with the bulk soil, under different hosts. Plant development stage was also an important consideration acting on this previously understudied but highly significant group of protists to crop health.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:675392 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Thomson, Serena K. |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/74239/ |
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