Dataset Information

Optimizing the Production of Nursery-Based Biological Soil Crusts for Restoration of Arid Land Soils.

ABSTRACT: Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) are topsoil communities formed by cyanobacteria or other microbial primary producers and are typical of arid and semiarid environments. Biocrusts promote a range of ecosystem services, such as erosion resistance and soil fertility, but their degradation by often anthropogenic disturbance brings about the loss of these services. This has prompted interest in developing restoration techniques. One approach is to source biocrust remnants from the area of interest for scale-up cultivation in a microbial "nursery" that produces large quantities of high-quality inoculum for field deployment. However, growth dynamics and the ability to reuse the produced inoculum for continued production have not been assessed. To optimize production, we followed nursery growth dynamics of biocrusts from cold (Great Basin) and hot (Chihuahuan) deserts. Peak phototrophic biomass was attained between 3 and 7?weeks in cold desert biocrusts and at 12?weeks in those from hot deserts. We also reused the resultant biocrust inoculum to seed successive incubations, tracking both phototroph biomass and cyanobacterial community structure using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Hot desert biocrusts showed little to no viability upon reinoculation, while cold desert biocrusts continued to grow, but at the expense of progressive shifts in species composition. This leads us to discourage the reuse of nursery-grown inoculum. Surprisingly, growth was highly variable among replicates, and overall yields were low, a fact that we attribute to the demonstrable presence of virulent and stochastically distributed but hitherto unknown cyanobacterial pathogens. We provide recommendations to avoid pathogen incidence in the process.IMPORTANCE Biocrust communities provide important ecosystem services for arid land soils, such as soil surface stabilization promoting erosion resistance and contributing to overall soil fertility. Anthropogenic degradation to biocrust communities (through livestock grazing, agriculture, urban sprawl, and trampling) is common and significant, resulting in a loss of those ecosystem services. Losses impact both the health of the native ecosystem and the public health of local populations due to enhanced dust emissions. Because of this, approaches for biocrust restoration are being developed worldwide. Here, we present optimization of a nursery-based approach to scaling up the production of biocrust inoculum for field restoration with respect to temporal dynamics and reuse of biological materials. Unexpectedly, we also report on complex population dynamics, significant spatial variability, and lower than expected yields that we ascribe to the demonstrable presence of cyanobacterial pathogens, the spread of which may be enhanced by some of the nursery production standard practices.

SUBMITTER: Bethany J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6643228 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Optimizing the Production of Nursery-Based Biological Soil Crusts for Restoration of Arid Land Soils.

Bethany Julie J Giraldo-Silva Ana A Nelson Corey C Barger Nichole N NN Garcia-Pichel Ferran F

Applied and environmental microbiology 20190718 15

Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) are topsoil communities formed by cyanobacteria or other microbial primary producers and are typical of arid and semiarid environments. Biocrusts promote a range of ecosystem services, such as erosion resistance and soil fertility, but their degradation by often anthropogenic disturbance brings about the loss of these services. This has prompted interest in developing restoration techniques. One approach is to source biocrust remnants from the area of interest ...[more]

PMID: 31152015

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Project description:Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) are slow-growing, phototroph-based microbial assemblages that develop on the topsoils of drylands. Biocrusts help maintain soil fertility and reduce erosion. Because their loss through human activities has negative ecological and environmental health consequences, biocrust restoration is of interest. Active soil inoculation with biocrust microorganisms can be an important tool in this endeavor. We present a culture-independent, two-step process to grow multispecies biocrusts in open greenhouse nursery facilities, based on the inoculation of local soils with local biocrust remnants and incubation under seminatural conditions that maintain the essence of the habitat but lessen its harshness. In each of four U.S. Southwest sites, we tested and deployed combinations of factors that maximized growth (gauged as chlorophyll a content) while minimizing microbial community shifts (assessed by 16S rRNA sequencing and bioinformatics), particularly for crust-forming cyanobacteria. Generally, doubling the frequency of natural wetting events, a 60% reduction in sunlight, and inoculation by slurry were optimal. Nutrient addition effects were site specific. In 4 months, our approach yielded crusts of high inoculum quality reared on local soil exposed to locally matched climates, acclimated to desiccation, and containing communities minimally shifted in composition from local ones. Our inoculum contained abundant crust-forming cyanobacteria and no significant numbers of allochthonous phototrophs, and it was sufficient to treat ca. 6,000 m2 of degraded dryland soils at 1 to 5% of the typical crust biomass concentration, having started from a natural crust remnant as small as 6 to 30 cm2 IMPORTANCE: Soil surface crusts can protect dryland soils from erosion, but they are often negatively impacted by human activities. Their degradation causes a loss of fertility, increased production of fugitive dust and intensity of dust storms with associated traffic problems, and provokes general public health hazards. Our results constitute an advance in the quest to actively restore biological soil covers by providing a means to obtain high-quality inoculum within a reasonable time (a few months), thereby allowing land managers to recover essential, but damaged, ecosystem services in a sustainable, self-perpetuating way as provided by biocrust communities.

Project description:IntroductionBiological soil crusts (biocrusts) are known as biological hotspots on undisturbed, nutrient-poor bare soil surfaces and until now, are mostly observed in (semi-) arid regions but are currently poorly understood in agricultural systems. This is a crucial knowledge gap because managed sites of mesic regions can quickly cover large areas. Thus, we addressed the questions (i) if biocrusts from agricultural sites of mesic regions also increase nutrients and microbial biomass as their (semi-) arid counterparts, and (ii) how microbial community assemblage in those biocrusts is influenced by disturbances like different fertilization and tillage regimes.MethodsWe compared phototrophic biomass, nutrient concentrations as well as the abundance, diversity and co-occurrence of Archaea, Bacteria, and Fungi in biocrusts and bare soils at a site with low agricultural soil quality.Results and discussionBiocrusts built up significant quantities of phototrophic and microbial biomass and stored more nutrients compared to bare soils independent of the fertilizer applied and the tillage management. Surprisingly, particularly low abundant Actinobacteria were highly connected in the networks of biocrusts. In contrast, Cyanobacteria were rarely connected, which indicates reduced importance within the microbial community of the biocrusts. However, in bare soil networks, Cyanobacteria were the most connected bacterial group and, hence, might play a role in early biocrust formation due to their ability to, e.g., fix nitrogen and thus induce hotspot-like properties. The microbial community composition differed and network complexity was reduced by conventional tillage. Mineral and organic fertilizers led to networks that are more complex with a higher percentage of positive correlations favoring microbe-microbe interactions. Our study demonstrates that biocrusts represent a microbial hotspot on soil surfaces under agricultural use, which may have important implications for sustainable management of such soils in the future.

Dataset Information

Optimizing the Production of Nursery-Based Biological Soil Crusts for Restoration of Arid Land Soils.

Publications

Optimizing the Production of Nursery-Based Biological Soil Crusts for Restoration of Arid Land Soils.

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