Soil models include a key parameter known as carbon use efficiency, which impacts estimates of global carbon storage by determining the flow of carbon into soil pools versus the atmosphere. Microbial-...

Abstract. Soils can potentially be turned into net carbon sinks for atmospheric carbon to offset anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Occlusion of soil

Puppet helps insect trick real termites into feeding it

We summarize the large body of research on Sonoran Desert winter annuals to demonstrate how experimental designs that employ common gardens to integrate processes across scales hold special promise. ...

Ecology has yet to embrace causal inference, yet most questions in ecology are causal. Despite the common use of terms that imply causation, such as “shapes”, “drives”, or “impacts”, many studies shy...

Motivation Here, we make available a second version of the BioTIME database, which compiles records of abundance estimates for species in sample events of ecological assemblages through time. The up...

Widespread grassland degradation poses major societal and environmental challenges. Here, the authors propose multiple targeted interventions as a crucial strategy for simultaneously enhancing grassla...

In a field experiment, we tested how priority and year effects influence the aboveground and belowground structure and functioning of dry acidic grasslands. Time since establishment and year of initi...

Welcome address and drinks evening of Sunday the 15th June Conference proper starts at 09.00 on Monday 16th and closes at 13.30 on Thursday the 19th of June.

Microbial communities play a crucial role in supporting plant health and productivity. Reproducible, natural plant-associated microbiomes can help disentangle microbial dynamics across time and space. Here, using a sequential propagation strategy, we generated a complex and reproducible wheat rhizosphere microbiome (RhizCom) to study successional dynamics and interactions between the soil and heritable seed-borne rhizosphere microbiomes (SbRB) in a microcosm. Using 16S rRNA sequencing and genome-resolved shotgun metagenomics, we find that SbRB surpassed native soil microbes as the dominant rhizosphere-associated microbiome source. SbRB genomes were enriched in host-associated traits including degradation of key saccharide (niche partitioning) and cross-feeding interactions that supported partner strains (niche facilitation). In vitro co-culture experiments confirmed that helper SbRB strains facilitated the growth of partner bacteria on disaccharides as sole carbon source. These results reveal the importance of seed microbiota dynamics in microbial succession and community assembly, which could inform strategies for crop microbiome manipulation.