Exploration of Soil Functional Microbiomes-A Concept Proposal for Long-Term Fertilized Grasslands

Exploring grassland microbiomes is a challenge in the current context of linking soil microorganism activity with the balance of these ecosystems. Microbiologists are constantly attempting to develop faster and lower-cost methods, and propose new and best-fitted indicators that will provide a more complex data analysis. A different concept was proposed for assessing functional microbiomes by splitting the functional ecological niche into complementary segments. The comparison with the upper and lower limits of the ecological niche provides a clearer image of community alterations due to long-term applied treatments. The method allows the extraction of the most sensitive and stable functional guilds, with the extraction of the most critical dominant-codominant functional groups in every segment of the functional niche. The resulting microbial functional-sociological model is ready to use on community-level physiological profile databases and also can be applied backward for vegetation analysis.