Sampling of Bacteria, Eukaryotes and Archaea within english soil, at the landscape scale under different land use management practices.. Soil Microbiota Across The Landscape

Sustainable agricultural intensification has been identified as a way of maintaining food productivity whilst reducing environmental impacts. In Europe agri-environment schemes (AES) were introduced to ameliorate the unintended consequence of agricultural intensification, with field margins or strips of agricultural land taken out of production and left fallow (‘set-aside’). Understanding the impact of this land use change on soil microbial distribution patterns is fundamental to understanding crop health given the significant influence microorganisms have on crops, and their sensitivity to anthropogenic change. At the landscape scale, we investigated the drivers of spatial scaling, including the impact of land use change, on twenty one microbial groups, across the Archaeal, bacterial and eukaryote domains. Soil was collected from 17 paired arable and set-aside fields across England, with a maximum separation of 390 km. We revealed that there was no single universal driver of microbial distribution and demonstrated for the first time, that taxa groupings from all three domains demonstrate spatial scaling across the landscape. The landscape distribution of eukaryotic taxa was determined by environment and land use, while for bacterial and archaeal taxa, environment was the key driver. Furthermore the environmental variables associated with community composition differed between prokaryotic and eukaryotic taxa groupings and differed depending on land use management.