Highly diverse and abundant organisms coexist in soils. However, the contribution of biotic interactions between soil organisms to microbial community assembly remains to be explored. Here, we assess the extent to which soil fauna can shape microbial community assembly using an exclusion experiment in a grassland field to sort soil biota based on body size. After 1 year, the exclusion of larger fauna favoured phagotrophic prot...

Artificial selection of microbiota opens new avenues for improving plants. However, reported results lack consistency. We hypothesised that the success in artificial selection of microbiota depends on the stabilisation of community structure. In a ten‐generation experiment involving 1,800 plants, we selected rhizosphere microbiota of Brachypodium distachyon associated with high or low leaf greenness, a proxy of plant performan...

Tropical forests exhibit significant heterogeneity in plant functional and chemical traits that may contribute to spatial patterns of key soil biogeochemical processes, such as carbon storage and greenhouse gas emissions. Although tropical forests are the largest ecosystem source of nitrous oxide (N 2 O), drivers of spatial patterns within forests are poorly resolved. Here, we show that local variation in canopy foliar N, mapp...

Agriculture is the main source of terrestrial N 2 O emissions, a potent greenhouse gas and the main cause of ozone depletion. The reduction of N 2 O into N 2 by microorganisms carrying the nitrous oxide reductase gene ( nosZ ) is the only known biological process eliminating this greenhouse gas. Recent studies showed that a previously unknown clade of N 2 O‐reducers ( nos Z II ) was related to the potential capacity of the soi...

Plant species are important drivers of soil microbial communities. However, how plant functional traits are shaping these communities has received less attention though linking plant and microbial traits is crucial for better understanding plant‐microbe interactions. Our objective was to determine how plant–microbe interactions were affected by plant traits. Specifically we analyzed how interactions between plant species and m...

Summary Whether bacteria display spatial patterns of distribution and at which level of taxonomic organization such patterns can be observed are central questions in microbial ecology. Here we investigated how the total and relative abundances of eight bacterial taxa at the phylum or class level were spatially distributed in a pasture by using quantitative PCR and geostatistical modelling. The distributions of the relative abu...

Summary There is ample evidence that microbial processes can exhibit large variations in activity on a field scale. However, very little is known about the spatial distribution of the microbial communities mediating these processes. Here we used geostatistical modelling to explore spatial patterns of size and activity of the denitrifying community, a functional guild involved in N‐cycling, in a grassland field subjected to dif...