Microbiology Commons^™

Factors Influencing The Nematode Community During Composting And Nematode-Based Criteria For Compost Maturity, Deborah A. Neher

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

Pilot studies indicate that shifts in the nematode species composition, life strategies and feeding behavior during composting appear to be fairly consistent and, therefore, promising as a potential tool to assess compost maturity. However, this has been only based on a limited number of, mainly, non-replicated observations. In this study, we tested whether the nematode community succession patterns are recurrent for parallel processes and assessed the relationship between the changes in the nematode community and potential important variables (i.e., temperature, duration of composting and the microbial community). The nematode and microbial community of three simultaneously running Controlled Farm Composting and …