Abstract
Stable soils provide valuable ecosystem services and mechanical soil stability is enhanced by the presence of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). Soil aggregation, which is the major driver of mechanical soil stability, is often treated as a static phenomenon, even though aggregate turnover is continually ongoing. In fact, some breakdown of macroaggregates is necessary to allow new aggregate formation and inclusion of new organic matter into microaggregates. We determined how aggregate turnover times were affected by AMF by tracking movement of rare earth elements (REE), applied as their immobile oxides, between aggregate size classes, and using X-ray fluorescence microscopy to spatially localize REEs in a sample of aggregates. Here we show that AMF increased large macroaggregate formation and slowed down disintegration of large and small macroaggregates. Microaggregate turnover was increased in the presence of AMF. Internal aggregate organization suggested that although formation of microaggregates by accretion of soil to particulate organic matter is common, it is not the only mechanism in operation.
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Data availability
Raw data for X-ray fluorescence microscopy were generated at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. Derived data supporting the findings of this study are included in the paper and its supplementary information files. Other data, REE concentrations, and aggregate size class distributions are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Sabine Artelt and Sabine Buchert for help in the lab at FU Berlin, and the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und –prüfung for help preparing thin sections of soil aggregates. This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
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EKM, DJPM, and MCR designed the experiments. EKM and DJPM completed REE labeling and incubation. EKM, DJPM, and S-CG completed X-ray fluorescence microscopy. MB and WW completed ICP-MS work. EKM, DJPM, SV, and S-CG completed data analysis. EKM and DJPM wrote the manuscript, and all authors edited the manuscript.
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Morris, E.K., Morris, D.J.P., Vogt, S. et al. Visualizing the dynamics of soil aggregation as affected by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. ISME J 13, 1639–1646 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-019-0369-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-019-0369-0
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