Soil translocation field experiment

This study compares the effectiveness of three soil translocation methods for inoculating soil microbial communities within an ecosystem restoration project in southwest Western Australia. We compared three different soil translocation methods that aimed to isolate the effects of soil disturbance during translocation from the effects of establishment barriers at the recipient site. Our treatments were (a) intact soil cores, (b) mixed soil cores and (c) surface spreading. Our first hypothesis was that reduced soil disturbance (i.e., the intact soil core treatment) would positively associate with the establishment of translocated soil microbiota due to soil microbiota being sensitive to structural disturbance and soil homogenisation alone being capable of driving divergence in microbial composition. Our second hypothesis was that if we saw improved establishment of microbiota in the intact cores stemming from the reduced soil disturbance, this would result in greater dispersal of soil microbiota from the intact cores into the surrounding recipient site soil.