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Promoting soil functioning by maintaining soil microbial diversity and activity is central for sustainable agriculture. In viticulture, soil management often includes tillage, which poses a multifaceted disturbance to the soil environment and has direct and indirect effects on soil microbial diversity and soil functioning. However, the challenge of disentangling the effects of different soil management practices on soil microbial diversity and functioning has rarely been addressed. In this study, we investigated the effects of soil management on soil bacterial and fungal diversity as well as soil functions (soil respiration and decomposition) using a balanced experimental design with four soil management types in nine vineyards in Germany. Application of structural equation modelling enabled us to investigate the causal relationships of soil disturbance, vegetation cover, and plant richness on soil properties, microbial diversity, and soil functions. We could show that soil disturbance by tillage increased bacterial diversity but decreased fungal diversity. We identified a positive effect of plant diversity on bacterial diversity. Soil respiration showed a positive response to soil disturbance, while decomposition was negatively affected in highly disturbed soils via mediated effects of vegetation removal. Our results contribute to the understanding of direct and indirect effects of vineyard soil management on soil life and aids designing targeted recommendations for agricultural soil management.

Soil tillage or herbicide applications are commonly used in agriculture for weed control. These measures may also represent a disturbance for soil microbial communities and their functions. However, the generality of response patterns of microbial communities and functions to disturbance have rarely been studied at large geographical scales. We investigated how a soil disturbance gradient (low, intermediate, high), realized by either tillage or herbicide application, affects diversity and composition of soil bacterial and fungal communities as well as soil functions in vineyards across five European countries. Microbial alpha-diversity metrics responded to soil disturbance sporadically, but inconsistently across countries. Increasing soil disturbance changed soil microbial community composition at the European level. However, the effects of soil disturbance on the variation of microbial communities were smaller compared to the effects of location and soil covariates. Microbial respiration was consistently impaired by soil disturbance, while effects on decomposition of organic substrates were inconsistent and showed positive and negative responses depending on the respective country. Therefore, we conclude that it is difficult to extrapolate results from one locality to others because microbial communities and environmental conditions vary strongly over larger geographical scales.

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