Effects of increasing land-use-intensity on the biodiversity and functions of microeukaryotes and microbial food webs in grasslands

We will mainly focus on protists and use trait-based community analyses to link species diversity to ecosystem functioning. Such a holistic approach can provide unique insights into the effects of land-use intensity (LUI) as compared to methodologies that tackle individual taxonomic groups of protists (bacteria, fungi, and nematodes), as emergent properties resulting from biotic interactions between divergent pro- and eukaryotic phyla will be captured within the single comprehensive biodiversity assessment provided by metatranscriptomics.

• The intensity of land use alters the composition, functionality and capability of soil organisms
• Soil type is a major structuring force for belowground communities.
• In particular changes in soil structure define the habitable pore space of soil organisms.
• Protists are the major consumers of fungi in the soil food web, while predatory bacteria in addition to protists are the major consumers of bacteria in the soil food web.

We will employ bioinformatics tools to assess the diversity of Eukaryotes from metatranscriptomics data. Further, we aim to explore the effects of soil types as environmental filters for protist diversity and functioning and how soil pore space, assessed by X-ray micro-computed tomography, impacts the diversity and functioning of microbial eukaryotes. Overall, we aim to employ co-occurrence network analysis to explore microbial food webs and identify patterns of species interactions. Specifically, we strive to assess the specificity of fungivorous protists, the relative proportions of bacterivorous protists, and the associations of predatory bacteria and fungi with their potential prey organisms in the BE_CENSE data.