Journal
BIOLOGY AND FERTILITY OF SOILS
Volume 51, Issue 4, Pages 517-521Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00374-015-0992-5
Keywords
Soil enzymes; Spatial heterogeneity; Microbial hotspots; Drilosphere; Rhizosphere; Bulk soil
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Funding
- German Research Foundation within the Research Unit 1320 [MU831/21-1]
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The spatial heterogeneity of nutrient turnover in subsoils has been rarely studied in the past, although drilosphere and rhizosphere are found to be important microbial hotspots in this oligotrophic environment. In this study, we measured different potential enzyme activities in different soil compartments of subsoil and topsoil. It could be shown that the activities of hydrolases, which cleave readily available organic substrates, are significantly higher in samples from the drilosphere and rhizosphere both in topsoil and subsoil. In bulk soil, hydrolase activities decrease with depth. In contrast, oxidative enzymes, which are involved in the decay of recalcitrant organic material, are released from the microbial community especially in the bulk fraction of subsoil. This emphasizes the importance of subsoil for nutrient acquisition and gives evidence for a distinct spatial separation of microbes with diverging lifestyles.
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