Fig. 2

Diversity (Shannon diversity index) of bacterial (A) and fungal (B) communities in the rhizosphere of compost amended and non-amended plants with and without FORC inoculation. Different letters indicate statistically significant differences obtained by multiple comparison of all pairs of means (Tukey HSD test, P < 0.05). PCoA ordination based on Bray–Curtis dissimilarity matrices of bacterial 16S rRNA gene (C) and fungal ITS gene (D) amplicons. The fungal ASV that was classified as Fusarium only present in FORC-inoculated samples, was excluded from this analysis. Compost amendment explained 59.1% and 53.6% of the differences in bacterial and fungal communities respectively (Adonis test—amendment group R² = 0.59 and 0.54 respectively, P < 0.05)