Land-use management fingerprint on the soil microbial diversity. Fontanili: a case study.

Background “Fontanili” (semi-natural low-land springs) are very typical and exclusive Italian ecosystems located in the Northern Italy Po river valley. Composed by different landscape patches, deeply marked by human intervention throughout the recent history, they are ideal ecosystems for studying effects of land-use management on the soil microbial community structure. Objectives In the present study we assess land use management effects on Prokaryotic diversity by comparing distinct soil environments encompassed in “Fontanili”. Methods Soil from three constituents a “Fontanile” ecosystem, namely riparian (spring bank), meadow and maize field was sampled in triplicates. DNA was extracted from samples and PCR was performed aiming in surveying short sequence length markers (~ 200 bp) residing in the V3 and V5 16S rDNA hypervariable regions. PCR products were sample-wise indexed and used to generate a single pool. Deep sequencing was carried out with Illumina-HiSeq2000 with an output of million read datasets. Both OTU (operational taxonomic unit) and taxonomy-based approaches were utilized for the data analysis. Results and Conclusion Major environmental differentiation factors amongst encompassed environments were readily available C, pH and Humidity, with the two first being identified also as diversity drivers. Achieved estimated microbial community coverage using the described approach reached up to 94 %. Relative abundance rather than richness differences were mostly responsible for microbial structure differences between the various management types. Anthropogenic influence on formation of these environments was evident in microbial community differences between samples of different management types for both analysis approaches used.