SOIL MICROBIOME AND CROP PRODUCTIVITY: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

One of the most complex or functional earth biological systems, an ecosystem of different communities of bacteria, fungi, archaea, and protists, is the soil microbiome that constitutes the dominant compelling mechanism of soil fertility, nutrient cycling, and plant health. Despite decades of studies giving correlations of microbial diversity and agricultural performance, critical gaps in knowledge remain on the mechanistic pathways through which specific microbial taxa influence crop productivity in diverse agroecological contexts. It was a literature review done in a systematic manner, which included Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) 2020 to include current evidence on relationships between the structure of microbial communities in soil and the parameters of crop yields. Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed and IEEE Xplore databases were searched by using structured Boolean search strings and 3,247 initial records were retrieved. Following the screening and eligibility test, 87 primary research articles published in 2019-2025 were identified with the inclusion criteria of qualitative synthesis. It has been analyzed that the microbial functional diversity is more strongly correlated with crop productivity univariately than taxonomic diversity alone with plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi emerging as significantly active functional units. However, the level of heterogeneity regarding methodological strategies is rather high, as methods based on metabarcoding and metagenomic are substituting culture-dependent ones, but introduce new standardization problems. The review concludes that the most significant gaps in research are the methods of microbiomes manipulation, microbial inoculants that remain available across climatic environments, and scaled-up uses of biotechnology to sustainable intensification. The outcomes of these studies point to the necessity to integrate the science of microbiomes into the precision farming system, as well as to understand that there can be no universal microbial solution since ecological interactions are context-specific. The future research needs to be mechanistic as opposed to descriptive taxonomies to attain transformative potential of soil microbiome management in the global food security practices.