Analysis of soil microorganisms from agricultural land and restored prairie at Glacier Creek Preserve and their indications of soil health and sustainability

The earth under our feet is more than just dirt. It is soil containing minerals, decaying organic matter, and most importantly microorganisms that make life aboveground possible. Healthy, living soils are critical components of any terrestrial ecosystem and play many key roles including increasing plant diversity, increasing plant growth and productivity, warding off invasive species, carbon and nitrogen cycling, preventing disease causing organisms, and regulation of water and air quality. Soils are known to be strongly affected by land management, with agriculture reducing soil carbon levels and altering soil nitrogen relative to more “natural” vegetation such as prairies. However, little is currently known about how land management affects soil microbial communities. UNO’s Glacier Creek Preserve provides an ideal location to examine the effects of land management on soil microbial communities, because the Preserve contains land that was in agriculture until 1970, at which point part of the land was restored to prairie and part remained in agriculture. I propose to examine how soil microbial communities differ between the soils of these two types of land management and to determine whether bacterial or fungal groups associated with decomposition, root growth, or nitrogen fixation are most abundant in particular types of land management