Speaker
Description
Stressful water-limited soils are typically covered by scattered plant patches that generate a mosaic of low-productive habitats, which are almost devoid of plants and comparatively driven by abiotic filters, interspersed with high-productive habitats comparatively driven by biotic interactions. Such ecosystems provide an ideal setting to disentangle which processes dominate the community assembly of soil microbiota and beyond, how community composition and diversity impact microbial-driven ecosystem functions. The talk will review, by combining metagenomics and phylogenetics, the abiotic and biotic processes that structure soil microbial communities in drylands, and how they leave specific phenotypic and phylogenetic signatures. The talk will also show how tracking microbial evolutionary legacies and exploring communities in terms of anciently- and recently-divergent lineages may enhance the predictions of key ecosystem functions, such as decomposition and nutrient cycling.
