Bacteria: Prairie strips quickly alter soil bacterial and fungal communities in strips, but not in surrounding cropland

Within a 35 year old cropping system experiment, we introduced prairie strips in two treatments, one with reduced chemical inputs and one with no chemical inputs, and we measured soil microbial communities every year for the first four years of prairie strip establishment, hypothesizing that communities would shift in soils under prairies, and subsequent dispersal from prairie communities would alter composition in surrounding cropland. We assessed alpha diversity, beta diversity, and relative abundance of prairie-associated microbial phyla in prairie strip soils and in cropland soils at multiple distances from prairie strips.