Soil hosts enormous microbial diversity, but microbes live in a patchwork of tiny habitats that differ in pore structure, chemistry, and water supply. Most studies analyze homogenized bulk soil, which mixes these habitats and removes the link between microbes and their immediate surroundings. This project develops and validates a workflow that measures soil pore architecture, physicochemical properties, root identity, and the microbial community composition on the same intact sub-gram soil sample. The workflow will then be applied to samples from a soil profile to test whether soil properties and microbial communities are more closely related at this finer scale than in conventional, homogenized bulk samples.
