Spatial trends in soil microbial communities

Forest soil can act as both a source and sink of carbon depending on the prevalence of microbial decomposition processes such as methanogenesis and respiration. These chemical reactions are controlled by RedOx potential, meaning RedOx potential may be one of the main drivers of soil bacterial diversity. In order to evaluate how microbial diversity is affected by RedOx potential, a lysimeter experiment was run and samples evaluated with qPCR. The resulting data was resampled to account for potential biases. Diversity metrics such as alpha- diversity and sparsity were computed in order to identify potential correlations with depth or oxidoreduction potential.