Researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have discovered that Amazon deforestation which is converting the forest land for agricultural use is impacting the microbial communities and creating an imbalance in the ecosystem.
"We found that after rainforest conversion to agricultural pastures, bacterial communities were significantly different from those of forest soils," said Nüsslein, an expert in tropical rain forest microbial soil communities, according to Eureka alert. "Not only did the pasture soils show increased species numbers, these species were also less related to one another than in rainforest soil. This is important because the combination of lost forest species and the homogenization of pasture communities together signal that this ecosystem is now a lot less capable of dealing with additional outside stress."
Nüsslein and his colleagues studied a large farm site over the past four years in Rondonia, Brazil, where farmers converted rainforest to agricultural use. They found that after conversion of the land for agricultural use, bacteria became more diverse.
Other researchers who were a part of the study includes first author Jorge Rodrigues at the University of Texas at Arlington with Brendan Bohannan at the University of Oregon, James Tiedje at Michigan State University, and others at the University of Sao Paulo.
Researchers are afraid that the loss of genetic variation in bacteria across the forest land converted to agricultural use is severely impacting the ecosystem resilience. They hope to prevent future Amazon deforestation by providing convincing data.
"We have known for a long time that conversion of rainforest land in the Amazon for agriculture results in a loss of biodiversity in plants and animals," says biologist and first author Jorge Rodrigues of the University of Texas at Arlington, according to eurekalert.com. "Now we know that microbial communities which are so important to the ecosystem also suffer significant losses."
Nüsslein and colleagues noted, despite Amazon signifies half of the world's rainforest and one-third of world's species' homes, it has the highest rates of deforestation. They stress the need to handle this carefully for the fact being agriculture is one of the largest parts of Brazil's economy.
"Whether bacterial diversity will completely recover from ecosystem conversion will depend in part on whether the taxa lost due to conversion are truly locally extinct or whether they are present in the pasture sites but of such low abundance that they are undetectable in our study," the authors write.
The results of this study are published in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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