Relationship between the amounts of surface corn stover mulch and soil mesofauna assemblage varies with the season in cultivated areas of northeastern China
Introduction
The degradation of agricultural soil in traditional soil cultivation systems, resulting from excessive tillage and heavy applications of agrochemicals, has emerged as a threat to sustainable crop production and food security, especially for developing countries (Derpsch and Moriya, 1999; Derpsch, 2008; Geiger et al., 2010). Therefore, practical solutions for soil conservation are urgently required to ensure sustainable food production (Foley et al., 2011). Conservation tillage based on minimum or no-till, along with crop residue retained as mulch on soil surfaces, has widely been recognized as a practical solution for improving soil quality and maintaining crop productivity (Hobbs, 2007; Singh and Rengel, 2007; Pittelkow et al., 2015; Knapp and van der Heijden, 2018; Kassam et al., 2019). It has been found that in comparison to conventional tillage, conservation tillage provides numerous benefits for improving soil properties, which are to a large extent provided by the retention of crop residue (Hartwig and Ammon, 2002; Ranaivoson et al., 2017; Wittwer et al., 2017; Sharma et al., 2018). Crop residue mulch can reduce soil wind and water erosion, decrease soil water evaporation, ameliorate soil surface temperature fluctuations, enhance organic matter inputs, and favor biological nitrogen fixation (Dabney et al., 2001; Stubbs et al., 2004; Hobbs et al., 2008; Basche et al., 2016). However, the effects of surface crop residue mulch on soil quality are dependent on the amount of crop residue and the selected agricultural-ecological functions (Ranaivoson et al., 2017). Previous related studies have determined that greater amount of crop residue retention tend to significantly improve soil water infiltration and control soil losses caused by winds or water runoff (Scopel et al., 2004; Woyessa and Bennie, 2004; Blanco-Canqui and Lal, 2007; Jordán et al., 2010). Meanwhile, the availability levels of soil nutrients, such as N, P, and K, have tended to show relatively weak responses to increased amount of surface residue (Govaerts et al., 2006; Singh and Rengel, 2007; Iqbal et al., 2011). Therefore, it has been indicated that variations in the levels of crop residue retention on the soil surface exert different influences on the soil environment.
The mesofauna living in soil or litter are generally a highly diverse and abundant group of soil fauna, and represent a key component of the agroecosystem (Culliney, 2013). Soil invertebrates are usually used as indicators to assess soil quality and biodiversity (Ponge et al., 2003; Gulvik, 2007; Bedano et al., 2011; Mahdi et al., 2017), since they are sensitive to soil environmental changes, and their species permit insights into the soil ecological conditions (Yan et al., 2012; George et al., 2017). The abundance and richness of species are closely related to soil properties such as pH, organic matter, water content, and soil metal content (Filser et al., 2000; Wolters, 2000; Kardol et al., 2011). For example, Kardol et al. (2011) found that the density and species richness of collembola were positively related to soil moisture content. In addition, the mesofauna living in soil affect many of the soil’s physio-chemical properties and microbial processes which contribute to soil fertility and sustainable agricultural productivity (Seastedt, 1984; Bender et al., 2016; Zagatto et al., 2019). It has been observed that soil mesofaunal activities both directly and indirectly affect the decomposition of organic matter and nutrient cycling by consuming litter and accelerating the turnover rates of soil microbial biomasses, as well as reworking the feces of soil macrofauna (Faber, 1991; Hopkin, 1997; Filser, 2002; Lavelle et al., 2006; Kampichler and Bruckner, 2009; Wang et al., 2017). As a result, the changes induced by conservation tillage in soil environments will inevitably influence the soil mesofauna, and thereby affect their ecological functions. Generally speaking, agricultural systems which involve minimum tillage and crop residue retention have been shown to increase the abundance and diversity of soil mesofauna when compared with conventional tillage practices. This is mainly due to the fact that crop residue mulch creates stability in soil environments, as well as providing food, shelter, and overwintering sites (Hendrix et al., 1986; Kladivko, 2001; Stubbs et al., 2004). However, such effects will vary depending on the climate, soil characteristics, residue types, and the amount of crop residue mulch. At the present time, there is no consensus on how soil communities respond to increasing amount of residue. Therefore, investigating the responses of soil mesofauna to no-till practices and increasing amount of residue will assist in achieving more precise management strategies in agricultural environments.
Northeastern China is the main crop production area of the country. In these cultivation regions, crop residues are often removed for animal feed or fuel, and tillage is used as a means to control weeds and modify soil compaction. Despite the aforementioned potential benefits, both tillage and residue harvesting have led to seriously degraded soil characterized by thin soil layers, nutrient imbalances, and decreased biodiversity. These effects have had negative long-term impacts on soil functions in the area (Yang et al., 2006; Ouyang et al., 2018). In order to recover soil quality and sustainable crop production, the use of conservation tillage has been extending in northeastern China. Major studies regarding conservation tillage have been previously conducted in northeastern China’s agricultural regions. However, the majority of those studies had mainly focused on the physicochemical properties of the soil, with only scarce reports presented regarding soil mesofauna (Li et al., 2013; Huang et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2019). At the present time, relatively few studies have systematically examined the responses of soil mesofauna to increasing amount of crop residue (Zhan et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2015).
Therefore, this study examined the crop cultivation area of northeastern China for the purpose of estimating the potential interacting effects on soil mesofauna of no-till with different amounts of corn stover. This study addressed the following hypotheses: (1) corn stover mulch is the dominant factor supporting more abundant and diverse soil mesofauna communities, and (2) the responses of the soil mesofauna to increasing amount of residue vary with the seasons. The findings from this study are expected to enable future designs of agricultural management practices which will enhance biodiversity and improve the functioning of arable soil ecosystems.
Section snippets
Study site
This experiment was conducted in the field site of the Conservation Tillage Research and Development Station of the Chinese Academy of Sciences located in Jilin Province of northeastern China (43°19′N, 124°14′E). The field site has been managed since 2007 under the conditions of conservation tillage, with the initial properties of a 0–20 cm soil layer containing 11.3 g kg−1 soil organic carbon; 1.2 g kg−1 total N; 0.38 g kg−1 total P; 24.3 g kg−1 total K; and a pH (H2O) level of 7.1. The site
Taxonomic groups of soil mesofauna
During the study period, a total of 27 taxonomic groups were identified among the research plots (Table S1). Acari was the overall dominant mesofauna group, which comprised more than 50 % of the total abundance of mesofauna collected across the different treatments. Oribatida was the most abundant mite group, accounting for more than 80 % of the total Acari abundance. Collembola was the second most abundant mesofauna component. Therein, Isotomidae and Hypogastruridae were the major families,
Effects on the soil mesofauna of the tillage
It was observed that the conventional tillage harbored the least abundance of soil mesofauna among all the treatments across the growing season. There were many detrimental effects on the survival of the soil mesofauna in conventional tillage, including the clearance of non-crop plants, destruction of the upper layers of the soil, physical disturbances to the soil environment, exposure to desiccation and erosion; limited access to food resources, and modifications of the mesofauna habitats. In
Conclusions
The results obtained in this study provided evidence of the differences in the degrees of responses of soil mesofauna to no-till with different amounts of corn stover mulch during three distinct seasons in a temperate monsoon agricultural region (Northeastern China). The no-till practices combined with different corn stover retention amounts systems provided distinct microhabitats, which resulted in various consequences for the assemblage compositions and diversity levels of the soil mesofauna.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest to this work. We declare that we do not have any commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest in connection with the work submitted.
Acknowledgments
The authors appreciate the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions regarding the manuscript. Thanks to the staff of the Conservation Tillage Research and Development Station for helping us to finish the fieldwork. This research was funded by the National key R & D Program Project (2017YFD300604), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 41401283, 41671297) and the China Scholarship Council (CSC) (file number 201810038).
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