RESEARCH ARTICLE Profile Changes in the Soil Microbial Community When Desert Becomes Oasis

The conversion of virgin desert into oasis farmland creates two contrasting types of land-cover. During oasis formation with irrigation and fertilizer application, however, the changes in the soil microbial population, which play critical roles in the ecosystem, remain poorly understood. We applied high-throughput pyrosequencing to investigate bacterial and archaeal communities throughout the profile (0–3 m) in an experimental field, where irriga-tion and fertilization began in 1990 and cropped with winter wheat since then. To assess the effects of cultivation, the following treatments were compared with the virgin desert: CK (n