Microbial diversity, in the context of structural and composi-
tional shifts among sampled communities, has been used to
assess impact of land use change in a wide range of studies
To assess impacts on functional capacity of soil ecosystems, an
extensively used approach has been to quantify genes linked with
the microbially-mediated cycling of nitrogenous compounds. In
particular, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based methods have
been developed to characterize a suite of genes linked to each step
of reduction of nitrogen through the denitrification pathway (i.e.
NO
3
!
NO
2
!
NO
!
N2O
!
N2)