We knew there were Blind cave eel populations in the Robe Valley, because specimens had been found in eight sites, but the real question was – how do you monitor a mostly uncatchable fish?
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We work with clients to better understand the impact of their land management practices – from the soil up.
Recently, we worked with regenerative chicken farmers who had observed vegetation changes in paddocks where their chickens were being grazed. There were more perennial grasses where the chickens had been grazing and more blackberries in the areas not being grazed.
Although our farmer was simply curious to understand what was happening beneath the surface of their paddocks; data from soil sampling could form useful components of standard organic and biodynamic accreditations.
How we helped
We sampled replicates of two treatment sites to evaluate the impact of chicken grazing on the soil microbiome, characterising the soil fungal and bacterial microbiomes across ‘Chicken’ and ‘No Chicken’ paddocks to understand what was changing at a microorganic level.
What we uncovered
- Although there were no broad differences in microbiome composition that easily explained the vegetation differences observed, we did identify a significant increase in the relative abundance of animal pathogenic fungi in the paddocks intensively grazed by chickens. In particular, fungi from the genus Beauveria, typically invertebrate pathogens and Trichosporon, commonly found in chicken gut microbiomes and a potential human pathogen, were more abundant.
- Bacteria capable of hydrocarbon degradation were more common in Chicken paddocks, possibly reflecting fuel contamination by farm machinery.
- We also observed a significant increase in the relative abundance of Mortierellomycota, shown to be linked to chicken manure in Chicken grazed paddocks.
Image caption: Waffle plot illustrating the relative abundance of the top three fungal phyla in each paddock types. Each cell represents one per cent of total fungal Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs) identified.
As well as broadening our understanding of how soil organisms respond to land use change; soil microbiome analyses are likely to be meaningful in the emerging nature repair market as a way of demonstrating meaningful improvement to soil resources because of a change in land management or use.
