Molecular monitoring of the poplar wood chip microbiome as a function of storage strategy

One of the most challenging aspects of using wood chips as renewable energy source is loss of biomass related to storage. Therefore, we installed three outdoor industrial-scale piles of poplar wood chips and monitored the bacterial and fungal communities by next-generation sequencing over a storage period of 120 days. Two of the three piles were supplemented with calcium dihydroxide in order to test its potential as alkaline stabilization agent to preserve woody biomass during storage. Shifts in the bacterial and fungal community compositions were observed using Illumina Miseq sequencing of the 16S and ITS2 gene, respectively.