Cover Crop Management Practices Rather Than Composition of Cover Crop Mixtures Affect Bacterial Communities in No-Till Agroecosystems.

ABSTRACT: Cover cropping plays a key role in the maintenance of arable soil health and the enhancement of agroecosystem services. However, our understanding of how cover crop management impacts soil microbial communities and how these interactions might affect soil nutrient cycling is still limited. Here, we studied the impact of four cover crop mixtures varying in species richness and functional diversity, three cover crop termination strategies (i.e., frost, rolling, and glyphosate) and two levels of irrigation at the cover crop sowing on soil nitrogen and carbon dynamics, soil microbial diversity, and structure as well as the abundance of total bacteria, archaea, and N-cycling microbial guilds. We found that total nitrogen and soil organic carbon were higher when cover crops were killed by

SUBMITTER: Romdhane S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6629898 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature