Refined conversion factors for soil fungal biomarkers are proposed. High interspecific variability is present in all fungal biomarkers. A modeling approach supports the validity of biomarker estimates in diverse soils. ITS1 copies vary strongly, but are fungal-specific with least phylogenetic bias. A combination of fungal biomarkers will reveal soil fungal physiology and activity. The abundances of fungi and bacteria in soil a...

The susceptibility of timber to microbial degradation is a major challenge for its long-term outdoor usage. It is important to know which microorganisms are responsible for wood degradation and which environmental factors influence the species composition in order to make adjustments for extending their service life in the future.

Agriculture is likely to expand poleward with climate change, encouraging deforestation for agriculture in subarctic regions, which alters soil physical, chemical and biological properties and potentially affects microbial metabolic efficiency. Deciphering how and by which mechanisms land-use change affects microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) will enable the development of mitigation strategies to alleviate C losses. We asse...

Background Sustainable agriculture seeks to optimize the application of nitrogen (N) fertilizers to reduce adverse economic and ecological effects. Crop diversification has been proposed to increase the efficiency of N fertilization. An open question is how the soil microbiome responds to these beneficial practices. Methods In a field study we investigated the effects of mineral N fertilizer with a 0-control, a conventional am...

Microbiologically driven ecosystem processes can be profoundly altered by alien plant invasions. There is limited understanding of the ecological mechanisms orchestrating different microbial constituents and their roles in emerging functional properties under plant invasions. Here, we investigated soil microbial communities and functions using high‐throughput amplicon sequencing and GeoChip technology, respectively, along a ch...

Summary Soil salinity acts as a critical environmental filter on microbial communities, but the consequences for microbial diversity and biogeochemical processes are poorly understood. Here, we characterized soil bacterial communities and microbial functional genes in a coastal estuarine wetland ecosystem across a gradient (~5 km) ranging from oligohaline to hypersaline habitats by applying the PCR‐amplified 16S rRNA (rRNA) ge...