An Underground Revolution: Biodiversity and Soil Ecological Engineering for Agricultural Sustainability

Evaluation of the Microbial Viability of Soil Samples from Maize Crops in Freeze-Storage under Different Management Conditions in a Semi-Arid Climate

“…Therefore, freeze-storage for up to eight months seems to be a sustainable process allowable in analyses of microbial population biodiversity, and should be reasonably acceptable for comparisons of different treatments within the same soil, given that the diversity indices of the total microorganism populations in the present study were not significantly affected. Although other studies [5] have suggested that the freeze-thaw process of soil samples should be avoided, our study did not find evidence for such a claim and, as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Convention on Biological Diversity) [37] and other studies [33][34][35][36] have stated, the microorganisms present in the soil contribute largely to the soil's sustainability and, thus, more studies on the preservation of this biological life should be perpetrated. …”

“…Other crops could have been used (i.e., sorghum or a gramineae/leguminosae consociation) but, because they have an equal or lower C/N ratio, according to Silva et al [29], than that of the chosen crop, the number of obtained microorganisms would be expectantly lower than that obtained. Optimum microorganism development is crucial, as it contributes in a decisive way to improve soil quality and sustainability according to previous studies [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] and, as we stated before, the freeze-thaw process did not affect most of the bacterial populations for a period of 44 months. However, one should keep in mind that, while one might expect the results to be very reproducible when working with similar soil microbial communities and environmental conditions, somehow different results could be obtained when studying very different soil microbial communities, principally because the effect of freeze-storage on the average cell viability of a given microbial community may well depend on its species composition.…”

Humusica 2, Article 14: Anthropogenic soils and humus systems, comparing classification systems

“…They used the soil for producing food or extracting materials for industrial purposes (Bender et al, 2016;Certini and Scalenghe, 2011;Osman, 2014;Richter et al, 2015). Humans manipulated every type of ecosystem, treating plants and soils as they were infinite resources.…”

Barcoding the food chain: from Sanger to high-throughput sequencing

“…In the context of agro-ecosystems, these techniques could supplement studies of the ecological impacts of agriculture on species diversity, such as the impacts of run-off into adjacent waterways. eDNA could similarly be extracted from soil to monitor the diversity of soil-dwelling invertebrates, fungi and bacteria (Orgiazzi et al 2015), which are all affected by ongoing agricultural activity (Caldwell et al 2015), but are also linked to ecosystem functioning (Bender et al 2016).…”