Environmental Science› Ecology› Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology

Soil microbial ecology — Land-use change in the Brazilian Pampa

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Environmental Science › EcologyType: No effect foundArea: soil microbial ecologyTarget: Land-use change in the Brazilian PampaStage: full study

Hypothesis

The same soil type in the same region would hold clearly different bacterial communities under different land uses.

What failed

16S rRNA pyrosequencing across four land uses on one soil type found broadly similar communities, with no difference in diversity or richness between natural and disturbed areas; measured microbial activity did not line up with the sequencing data.

Broken assumption

Converting native grassland to farming or plantations reshapes the soil bacterial community in a way sequencing will detect.

Why

The authors take the mismatch to mean that the composition and the functioning of soil bacterial communities are not necessarily coupled.

From the published paper: Lupatini et al. PLoS ONE, 2013. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

Related failures (1)

Matched on shared genes, mechanisms and ways of failing as well as wording. Each shows why it matched — treat these as leads rather than verdicts.

soil microbial ecologyPoplar and black bean forest-agriculture intercropping
Intercropping trees with a crop would raise soil microbial diversity along with soil fertility, relative to poplar monoculture.
High-throughput sequencing showed no significant effect of intercropping on bacterial or fungal alpha diversity, even though total phosphorus rose, the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio fell and community composition shifted, with fungal composition up and bacterial composition down.
Why it matched: same research area · similar wording

Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.