Assessing the influence of agriculture-based microbial consortia on semi-arid soil microbiome

Mining of mineral resources substantially alter the surrounding ecosystems both above and below-ground, which in turn impose a pressing need of new and efficient restoration procedures that can cope with such disturbance. One logical step towards the last, is to translate broadly-used practices from well-known systems (e.g. agricultural) into semi-arid condition and however, such translation efforts are poorly studied. Here, we report on a soil incubation experiment as a first approach to measure the feasibility of commercially-available soil microbial inoculums (SMI) isolated from agroecosystems on both plant fitness proxies (seed emergence, shoot to root ratio) and native soil microbial composition in order to assess the feasibility of SMI application for mine-site rehabilitation. In order to assess this, four treatments, each of them with different alteration level (i.e. Control < Nitrogen < Microbes < Both) were incubates over 12-week period. Our results indicate that exotic microorganisms introduced with the SMI have differential response over 12-week incubation period, where only some of them can persist or thrive in a semi-arid environment. More importantly, there is a general decreasing trend on the native microbiome diversity and plant parameters with highly disruptive treatments (i.e. Microbes and Both). We suggest that, although current agricultural-based SMI are not suitable to be immediately applied in rehabilitation practices, the idea of custom-made SMI for semi-arid environments can be a good way to boost rehabilitation outcomes.