Cover cropping and its biomass incorporation: Not enough to compensate the negative impact of plastic film mulching on global warming

Abstract

Plastic film mulching (FM) became a general practice to enhance crop productivity and its net primary production (NPP), but it can increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The proper addition of organic amendments might effectively decrease the impact of FM on global warming. To evaluate the feasibility of biomass addition on decreasing this negative influence, cover crop biomass as a green manure was incorporated with different recycling levels (0–100% of aboveground biomass) under FM and no-mulching. The net global warming potential (GWP) which integrated with soil C stock change and GHG (N2O and CH4) fluxes with CO2-equivalent was evaluated during maize cultivation. Under the same biomass incorporation, FM significantly enhanced the grain productivity and NPP of maize by 22–61 and 18–58% over no-mulching, respectively. In contrast, FM also highly increased the respired C loss, which was 11–95% higher than NPP increase, over no-mulching. Irrespective with biomass recycling ratio and mulching system, negative NECB which indicates the decrease of soil C stock was observed, mainly due to big harvest removal. FM decreased more soil C stock by 57–158% over no-mulching, but its C stock was clearly increased with increasing biomass addition. FM significantly increased total N2O and CH4 fluxes by 4–61 and 140–600% over no-mulching, respectively. Soil C stock changes mainly decided net GWP scale, but N2O and CH4 fluxes negligibly influenced. As a result, FM highly increased net GWP over no-mulching, while this net GWP was clearly decreased with increasing biomass application. However, cover cropping, and its biomass recycling was not enough to compensate the negative impact of FM on global warming. Therefore, more biomass incorporation might be essential to compensate this negative effect of FM.