Biological soil crusts are complex communities of organisms that develop on the top layer of dryland soils where they enhance important ecosystem services, including soil fertility and protection from erosion. Regrettably, a range of human activities such as cattle grazing, off‐road driving, hiking, and global warming result in significant deterioration of biocrust cover and their associated services. This scenario has prompted efforts to develop effective biocrust restoration strategies, which often involve the production of biocrust inoculum, both in greenhouse and in laboratory settings. Sometimes this inoculum is preconditioned in a process of “hardening” at considerable expense and effort in order to improve its fitness under harsh field conditions. But the positive effects of such hardening procedures have yet to be rigorously demonstrated. Here, we compared the growth performance of 20 cultured strains of biocrust cyanobacteria in outdoor tests on native soils as a function of preconditioning regimes consisting of increasingly high exposure to solar radiation, temperature and illumination daily variability, and recurrent wet‐dry cycles. Preconditioning improved performance in 13 out of 20 strains, particularly among pioneer crust‐forming Microcoleus spp. (eight out of eight). Improvements were variable among heterocystous strains (three out of four Scytonema spp., two out of four Tolypothrix spp., and none out of four Nostoc spp.). Based on these results, we recommend the inclusion of preconditioning treatments to increase inoculum survival rate and speed of cyanobacterial biocrust recovery in restoration of dryland soils.

中文翻译：

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预处理对土壤环境的影响20蓝细菌菌株作为生物结皮修复接种物的性能

生物土壤结皮是复杂的生物群落，生长在旱地土壤的顶层，在那里它们可以增强重要的生态系统服务，包括土壤肥力和防止侵蚀。令人遗憾的是，诸如放牧牛，越野驾驶，远足和全球变暖等一系列人类活动导致生物结皮及其相关服务的严重恶化。这种情况促使人们努力开发有效的生物结皮修复策略，该策略通常涉及温室和实验室环境中生物结皮接种物的生产。有时，这种接种物会在“硬化”过程中进行预处理，需要花费大量的精力和精力，以提高其在恶劣田间条件下的适应性。但是，这种硬化程序的积极作用尚未得到严格证明。在这里，我们比较了20种培养的生物壳蓝藻菌株在室外土壤上的自然生长性能，这些性能是预处理方案的函数，该预处理方案包括越来越高的日照暴露，温度和光照的日变化以及反复的干湿循环。预处理改善了20种菌株中的13种的性能，特别是在先驱者形成地壳的过程中Microcoleus属。（八分之八）。改进是heterocystous菌株间变量（四分之三的伪枝藻属，四分之二Tolypothrix属，并且没有出四个发菜属）。根据这些结果，我们建议采用预处理方法，以提高旱地土壤恢复中的接种物存活率和蓝细菌生物结皮的恢复速度。