Soil Microbiomes in Apple Orchards Are Influenced by the Type of Agricultural Management but Never Match the Complexity and Connectivity of a Semi-natural Benchmark.

ABSTRACT: Conversion of natural ecosystems into agricultural land may strongly affect the soil microbiome and the functioning of the soil ecosystem. Alternative farming systems, such as organic farming, have therefore been advocated to reduce this impact, yet the outcomes of different agricultural management regimes often remain ambiguous and their evaluations mostly lack a proper more natural benchmark. We used high-throughput amplicon sequencing, linear models, redundancy analyses, and co-occurrence network analyses to investigate the effect of organic and integrated pest management (IPM) on soil fungal and bacterial communities in both the crop and drive rows of apple orchards in Belgium, and we included semi-natural grasslands as a benchmark. Fungi were strongly influenced by agricultural manage

SUBMITTER: Hulsmans E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8888915 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature