However, our PERMANOVA results indicated that the anatomical phenotype root-cross section area (RXSA) was only marginally significant to the rhizosphere beta diversity ( P = 0.083, F 1,5 = 1.65; R 2 = 0.29) of the grassland mixture.
This suggests that environmental filters imposed by each sampling location might be less important than other factors, like dispersion (which, in this context, could refer to the initial soil inoculum), ecological drift (growth dynamics of the microbial population), or priority effects (which might be significant in a system containing 5–15 % soil) ( Li and Gao, 2023 ).