Soil multifunctional resilience: the influence of agricultural practice on soil microbiome functioning

Soil functions underpin essential ecosystem functions (food security, water purification, carbon storage etc.) In turn, soil functions are determined by the soil microbial community whose abilities are moderated by the abiotic environment.

Here the Healthy Soils programme aims to refine our understanding of the functional processes from the microbial communities present in soil, the interactions with parameters commonly altered due to agricultural practice and how this influences the resilience of these functions to exogenous stress events.

Here we used temperature stresses (freezing and heating) to probe the resilience of the microbiomes metabolism under long-term (100 years) differing agricultural management