Data from: Linking diversity, synchrony and stability in soil microbial communities

1. It is becoming well established that plant diversity is instrumental in
stabilizing the temporal functioning of ecosystems through population
dynamics and the so-called insurance or portfolio effect. However, it is
unclear whether diversity-stability relationships and the role of
population dynamics in soil microbial communities parallel those in plant
communities. 2. Our study took place in a long-term land management
experiment with and without perturbation to the soil ecosystem by tilling.
We assessed the impacts of the soil perturbation on the diversity,
synchrony and stability relationships in soil fungal and bacterial
communities. 3. We found that the perturbation to the soil ecosystem not
only reduced the abundance and richness of the fungal community, but it
also reduced the temporal stability in both bacterial and fungal
abundance. The fungal community abundance was destabilized by soil tilling
due to reduced richness and increased temporal variation of individual
taxa. In contrast, soil tilling destabilized the bacterial community
abundance by reducing the temporal variation of individual taxa. Both
bacterial and fungal community abundances were more temporally variable
when taxa fluctuated more synchronously through time. 4. Our results show
that land management practices, such as tilling, can destabilize soil
microbial abundance by reducing the richness and disrupting the temporal
dynamics belowground. However, the differences in the mechanisms that
underlie the temporal variations in fungal and bacterial net abundances
suggests that the mechanisms that drive the stability can differ among
guilds of organisms within the same system. The different temporal
responses between the fungal and bacterial communities are likely linked
to changes in edaphic properties resulting from the physical alteration of
the soil structure.