Abstract
Continuous monoculture of cool-season turfgrass causes soil degradation, and visual turf quality decline is a major concern in black soil regions of Northeast China. Turf mixtures can enhance turfgrass resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses and increase soil microbial diversity. Understanding mechanism by plant-soil interactions and changes of black soil microbial communities in turf mixture is beneficial to restoring the degradation of urbanized black soils and maintaining sustainable development of urban landscape ecology. In this study, based on the previous research of different sowing models, two schemes of turf monoculture and mixture were conducted in field plots during 2016–2018 in a black soil of Heilongjiang province of Northeast China. The mixture turf was established by mixing 50% Kentucky bluegrass “Midnight” (Poa pratensis L.) with 50% Red fescue “Frigg” (Festuca rubra L.); and the monoculture turf was established by sowing with pure Kentucky bluegrass. Turf performance, soil physiochemical properties, and microbial composition from rhizosphere were investigated. Soil microbial communities and abundance were analyzed by Illumina MiSeq sequencing and quantitative PCR methods. Results showed that turfgrass quality, turfgrass biomass, soil organic matter (SOM), urease, alkaline phosphatase, invertase, and catalase activities increased in PF mixture, but disease percentage and soil pH decreased. The microbial diversity was also significantly enhanced under turf mixture model. The microbial community compositions were significantly different between the two schemes. Turf mixtures obviously increased the abundances of Beauveria, Lysobacter, Chryseolinea, and Gemmatimonas spp., while remarkably reduced the abundances of Myrothecium and Epicoccum spp. Redundancy analysis showed that the compositions of bacteria and fungi were related to edaphic parameters, such as SOM, pH, and enzyme activities. Since the increasing of turf quality, biomass, and disease resistance were highly correlated with the changes of soil physiochemical parameters and microbial communities in turf mixture, which suggested that turf mixture with two species (i.e., Kentucky blue grass and Red fescue) changed soil microbial communities and enhanced visual turfgrass qualities through positive plant-soil interactions by soil biota.
Highlights
Lawn is an indispensable part of urban greening, which can provide many types of benefits to human beings, environmentally, esthetically, recreationally, economically, sociologically, and psychologically/physiologically (Cameron et al, 2012; Monteiro, 2017), whose value to human wellbeing is an increasingly seen feature (Smith and Fellowes, 2014)
Compared with the monoculture model, the mixture model increased turf biomass and visual quality in the black soil of northeast China, which was consistent with results in previous research (Simmons et al, 2011; Pooya et al, 2013; Granzow et al, 2017)
Studies indicated that the mixture planted with two or more plant species improved soil soluble nutrient levels by the interaction between rhizosphere microorganisms and plants and subsequently increased biomass, and quality of plants (Eisenhauer, 2016; Li et al, 2019; Zeng et al, 2019)
Summary
Lawn is an indispensable part of urban greening, which can provide many types of benefits to human beings, environmentally, esthetically, recreationally, economically, sociologically, and psychologically/physiologically (Cameron et al, 2012; Monteiro, 2017), whose value to human wellbeing is an increasingly seen feature (Smith and Fellowes, 2014). While, mixed sowing models in which at least two plant species are mixedsown in the same field at the same time are reported to enhance plant diversity at the field scale, maintain multiple ecosystem functions, such as the efficient use of water, soil, light, heat, and natural resources (Dunn et al, 2002; Pooya et al, 2013; Wahbi et al, 2016; Li et al, 2019), and control plant diseases (Zhu et al, 2000; Paulsen et al, 2006; Sapoukhina et al, 2010), adopting turfgrass mixture may be beneficial to solve some problems existing in turf monoculture
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