Further reduction in soil bacterial diversity under severe acidification in European temperate forests.

Despite a decrease in industrial nitrogen and sulfur deposition over recent decades, soil acidification remains a persistent challenge to European forest health, especially in regions of intense agriculture and urbanisation. Using topsoil eDNA metabarcoding and functional annotations from a sample of 49 plots (each 30 × 30 m) located in The Netherlands and Germany, we investigated the effect of severe acidification on bacterial taxonomic diversity under different forest types and explored potential functional implications for nutrient cycling. Furthermore, we assessed which soil parameters known to influence soil bacterial communities affect these acidophilic communities.

Forest top canopy bacterial communities are influenced by elevation and host tree traits.

Background: The phyllosphere microbiome is crucial for plant health and ecosystem functioning. While host species play a determining role in shaping the phyllosphere microbiome, host trees of the same species that are subjected to different environmental conditions can still exhibit large degrees of variation in their microbiome diversity and composition. Whether these intra-specific variations in phyllosphere microbiome diversity and composition can be observed over the broader expanse of forest landscapes remains unclear.

Cessation of grazing causes biodiversity loss and homogenization of soil food webs.

There is widespread concern that cessation of grazing in historically grazed ecosystems is causing biotic homogenization and biodiversity loss. We used 12 montane grassland sites along an 800 km north-south gradient across the UK, to test whether cessation of grazing affects local - and -diversity of below-ground food webs. We show cessation of grazing leads to strongly decreased -diversity of most groups of soil microbes and fauna, particularly of relatively rare taxa.

The aerobiome uncovered: Multi-marker metabarcoding reveals potential drivers of turn-over in the full microbial community in the air.

Air is a major conduit for the dispersal of organisms at the local and the global scale. Most research has focused on the dispersal of plants, vertebrates and human disease agents. However, the air represents a key dispersal medium also for bacteria, fungi and protists.

DNA of centuries-old timber can reveal its origin.

Oak wood was highly appreciated and widely used for construction in past centuries. As population sizes expanded in some regions of Europe, local forests were depleted of high-quality timber. Therefore, regions of soaring economies were importing timber initially from the European market and eventually from other continents.

Molecular Identification of Soil Eukaryotes and Focused Approaches Targeting Protist and Faunal Groups Using High-Throughput Metabarcoding.

While until recently the application of high-throughput sequencing approaches has mostly been restricted to bacteria and fungi, these methods have now also become available to less often studied (eukaryotic) groups, such as fauna and protists. Such approaches allow routine diversity screening for large numbers of samples via DNA metabarcoding. Given the enormous taxonomic diversity within the eukaryote tree of life, metabarcoding approaches targeting a single specific DNA region do not allow to discriminate members of all eukaryote clades at high taxonomic resolution.