Fig. 1: Study design.
From: Functional diversity of soil microbial communities increases with ecosystem development
Distribution of (a) sites across a national successional gradient in Sweden, based on (b) a paired grassland and forest sites comprising (c) managed, recently abandoned, and late successional grasslands together with fully afforested reference sites representing the successional endpoint. Soil samples were gathered in the field and sequenced with (d) amplicon and shotgun metagenomics to yield taxonomic and functional microbial community profiles, with the hypothesis that these would change (e) linearly, unimodally, or with threshold responses to succession. Note that the trends are shown as positive, i.e., with increasing diversity here, but may also be negative.
