Figure 1.
Principal coordinates analysis biplot for a) bacterial and b) fungal communities in three compost recipes (triangle: manure-silage, circle: hay, square: hardwood), n = 7 per treatment.
Permutational multivariate analysis of variance indicated that differences between communities were highly significant (p≤0.001). Contrasting superscripts indicate that treatments are significantly different (p≤0.05).
Table 1.
Mean ± 1 SD (n = 8) of dominant bacterial phyla and sub-phyla, expressed as percentage of sequences in cured manure, hay and hardwood compost recipes.
Table 2.
Mean ± 1 SD of fungal genera, expressed as percentage of sequences classified to phylum level in cured manure, hay, and hardwood compost recipes.
Figure 2.
Principal coordinates analysis biplot for a) bacterial and b) fungal communities in the end product of three compost processes (circle: windrow, square: aerated static pile, inverted triangle: vermicompost), n = 4 per process.
Permutational multivariate analysis of variance indicated that differences between communities were highly significant (p≤0.001). Contrasting superscripts indicate that treatments are significantly different (p≤0.05).
Table 3.
Mean ± 1 SD (n = 4) of total sequences classified as bacteria in a common recipe processed by windrow, aerated static pile or vermicompost.
Table 4.
Mean ± 1 SD of fungal ITS sequences classified to phylum level in a common recipe processed by windrow, aerated static pile or vermicompost.
Figure 3.
Heat map illustrating changes in A) bacterial and B) fungal composition through time for the same recipe composted by three processes: windrow, aerated static pile or vermicompost.
All fungi illustrated are ascomycota. Time is expressed as days of decomposition. The thermophillic phase occurred prior to sampling in windrow, days 22–56 for aerated static pile, and day 53 for vermicompost. Units illustrated as mean percentages of total sequences (bacteria) and percentage of taxa classified to phylum (fungi). Dots represent missing samples. Each column is colored so that taxa with high relative abundance are red, intermediate abundances are white and low abundances are blue.
Figure 4.
Shannon diversity of a) bacteria and b) fungal communities within a standardized recipe finished by windrow, aerated static pile (ASP) or vermicompost.
Shannon diversity is computed as H′ = −Σ(pi ln pi) where p represents the proportion of taxon i in the community. Box-whisker plots are illustrated.