Summary This study coupled a landscape‐scale metagenomic survey of denitrification gene abundance in soils with in situ denitrification measurements to show how environmental factors shape distinct denitrification communities that exhibit varying denitrification activity. Across a hydrologic gradient, the distribution of total denitrification genes ( nap/nar + nirK/nirS + cNor/qNor + nosZ) inferred from metagenomic read abunda...

Summary Model denitrifiers convert to N 2 , but it appears that a significant fraction of natural populations are truncated, conducting only one or two steps of the pathway. To better understand the diversity of partial denitrifiers in soil and whether discrepancies arise between the presence of known N‐oxide reductase genes and phenotypic features, bacteria able to reduce to were isolated from soil, N‐oxide gas products were...