Applied Soil Ecology, 2011,
48 (2), p. 243-246 ISSN 0929-1393
Soils are highly complex environments characterized by a huge diversity of organisms (especially microorganisms) and chemical compounds and by complex physical structure. Because of this complexity, it is often difficult to manipulate independently the microbial community, the organic matter, the clay types, etc., and to disentangle the various processes involved in soil functioning. In this paper, we propose the use of artificial soils as a simplified and adjustable tool to disentangle soil processes and test ecological theories on microbial communities. To create an artificial soil, a protocol was designed based on commercially available clays, sand, calcium carbonates and humic acids. Special attention was paid to aggregates and structure formation using differential sieving. Many aspects of our artificial soil can be adjusted as needed by altering mineral nutrient or humic acid concentrations, addition of other organic molecules, varying the quality of clays, etc. The advantage of an artificial soil is that chemical and biological diversity as compared with real soils can be reduced so that the effects of manipulations (adding an organism or a molecule, changing temperature, etc.) are not confounded by uncontrolled interactions. To test the capability of this artificial soil to support microbial growth and dynamics, six bacterial strains were independently inoculated and monitored for 19 days. Each strain was able to grow and mineralize the available organic matter. This artificial soil could thus be a good tool for studying different aspects of soil functioning.
