Skip to main content
Dryad

Soil microbiome dataset from the University of Wisconsin Arlington and Lancaster agricultural research stations and cheese maker and vegetable processor wastewater land application sites

Abstract

Cheese making and vegetable processing are trillion-dollar industries globally. However, they generate immense volumes of high nitrogen wastewater that must be processed safely and cost effectively. Land application systems are frequently used by rural medium and smaller processing facilities that lack ready access to wastewater resource recovery facilities. This study utilized soil microbial data to determine system differences leading to high denitrification rates observed in incubation studies in agricultural soil collected from University of Wisconsin Agricultural Research Stations (ARS), Arlington and Lancaster stations, compared to industry cheese making and vegetable processing land application water treatment facilities. It was hypothesized that decade long frequent treatment with facility wastewater would alter the microbial communities in the system soils, but this is not the case. No clear correlations were found between soil denitrification rates and biotic or abiotic system factors and the microbial communities observed in the industry systems are similar to the ARS soils under agricultural production and to literature reported denitrifying systems such as wetlands and wastewater resource recovery facilities. Knowing that land application system management does not alter the microbial biome will allow any management advances that increase denitrification efficiency in other denitrifying systems to be readily applied to industry wastewater land application facilities.