The impact of land-use changes and management intensification on bacterial communities in the last decade: a review

Abstract

In the last decade, advances in soil bacterial ecology have contributed to increasing agricultural production. Brazil is the world leading agriculture producer and leading soil biodiversity reservoir. Meanwhile, there is still a significant gap in the knowledge regarding the soil microscopic life and its interactions with agricultural practices, and the replacement of natural vegetation by agroecosystems is yet to be unfolded. Through high throughput DNA sequencing, scientists are now exploring the complexity of soil bacterial communities and their relationship with soil and environmental characteristics. This study aimed to investigate the progress of bacterial ecology studies in Brazil over the last 10 years, seeking to understand the effect of the conversion of natural vegetation in agricultural systems on the diversity and structure of the soil microbial communities. We conducted a systematic search for scientific publication databases. Our systematic search has matched 62 scientific articles from three different databases. Most of the studies were placed in southeastern and northern Brazil, with no records of studies about microbial ecology in 17 out of 27 Brazilian states. Out of the 26 studies that examined the effects of replacing natural vegetation with agroecosystems, most authors concluded that changes in soil pH and vegetation cover replacement were the primary drivers of shifts in microbial communities. Understanding the ecology of the bacteria inhabiting Brazilian soils in agroecosystems is paramount for developing more efficient soil management strategies and cleaner agricultural technologies.

Keywords: Brazilian biomes; land-use change; soil bacterial communities; soil microbial ecology; tropical diversity.

Fig 1

Screening scheme and selection of scientific articles in the databases PubMed, Scopus, and Scielo from 2012 to 2023.

Fig 2

Evolution of the publications in soil bacterial ecology in Brazil from 2012 to 2023 (a) and methods for evaluation of bacterial communities in ecological studies (b).

Fig 3

Numbers of studies in soil bacterial ecology in Brazilian states (a) and biomes (b) in the last 10 years.

Fig 4

Proportion of bacterial ecological studies in Brazilian soils from 2012 to 2023.