Mostly all soil-related studies focus on the changes of land use and how it alters the soil microbial communities, but an important detail that seems to be ignore is the temporal variability in the soils and how it compares to the communities. There was a study that collected soils on a monthly basis, May to November, from two agricultural land-use areas, which had an annual rotation of crop plants, and an early grassland in a research site in Michigan. In the study, the DNA from the soil was drawn out with an amount of 16S rRNA gene and was pyrosequenced. It was found that out of the 108 samples that were collected, only one sample failed to sequence. This just shows that the soil patterns and properties might change over a period of time.
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| Figure from Lauber et al. 2013 showing percent differences in UniFrac distances in land-use types over time. |
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