Figure 3. Microbial functional diversity decreased with heating; P. fluorescens alone provides 75 % of the diversity.

Soil microcosms were exposed to four different heating intensities (15°C, 60°C, 75°C or 90°C) for 24 h and subsequently amended with either P. fluorescens DSM 50090 or just with phosphate buffer and incubated for 42 days. Microbial diversity was measured as the fraction of substrates metabolised in Biolog EcoPlates with soil from the microcosms. We used a two-way ANOVA with heating intensity as quantitative variables and P. fluorescens as qualitative variable to test the results., data were Arcsine-square root transformed to equalize variances. P-values <0.05 are shown.