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Manure inputs are strongly associated with soil microbial community structure in pastoral farmland: disentangling shared variation with antibiotics and microplastics
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Researchers studied soil from ten farmland fields near a cattle farm in northwestern China, measuring manure markers, antibiotics, and microplastics. Manure input was the strongest factor linked to differences in soil microbial communities, while antibiotics showed no independent effect and microplastics' role remained unclear, requiring further controlled studies.
ABSTRACT With the intensification of livestock production, livestock manure has become a major pathway for the introduction of antibiotics and microplastics into agricultural soils. However, the relative contributions of manure organic fertilizer, antibiotics, and microplastics to soil microbial communities remain poorly resolved. In this study, ten pastoral farmland fields surrounding a large-scale cattle farm in northwestern China were investigated. Fecal sterol molecular markers were used to characterize the relative intensity of cattle manure input, while regionally prevalent antibiotics and soil microplastics were quantified and related to microbial community structure. The results showed that stigmastanol concentrations were significantly positively correlated with soil electrical conductivity, total nitrogen, organic matter, and available phosphorus, confirming the reliability of stigmastanol as a proxy for cattle manure input. The summed concentration of the 12 target antibiotics (Σ12 antibiotics) was not significantly associated with the manure-input gradient; only pefloxacin, ciprofloxacin, and enrofloxacin were significantly positively correlated with stigmastanol, whereas tetracyclines showed no significant association with the manure proxy. Microplastics were predominantly fine particles (<50 μm), while variation in polymer composition indicated contributions from both manure-associated and non-manure sources. Principal coordinate analysis revealed that sites with higher manure input clustered independently along the PCo1 axis (explaining 45.6% of the variation). In single-predictor distance-based redundancy analysis, stigmastanol was the strongest measured correlate of microbial community structure (adjusted R 2 = 0.394, p = 0.003). Variance partitioning further showed substantial overlap among the explanatory fractions associated with manure input, the selected antibiotic proxy, and microplastic abundance: the marginal association of pefloxacin was largely shared with the manure-input proxy, whereas the unique fraction associated with microplastics remained exploratory because its single-predictor model was not significant. This study establishes the predominant role of manure input in shaping the structural differentiation of soil microbial communities in pastoral farmland, rules out an independent community-level effect of antibiotics at current residual concentrations, and provides clear research hypotheses and priorities for subsequent controlled experiments investigating manure–antibiotic–microplastic interactions.
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