Abstract
Biochar as a soil amendment has been regarded as a promising way to improve soil fertility. However, the response of microbial community after biochar and biochar compound fertilizer (BCF) application has not been thoroughly elucidated. This study evaluated the changes in abundance and composition of bacterial and fungal communities using quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) and Illumina MiSeq amplicon sequencing. The field experiment ran for 3 years and comprised five treatments: chemical fertilizer as control (CK), straw-returning combined with chemical fertilizer (CS), low biochar application combined with chemical fertilizer (LB), high biochar application combined with chemical fertilizer (HB) and BCF. The results showed that biochar amendment results no changes in the abundance and diversity of bacteria in the bulk and rhizosphere soils. However, the abundance of soil fungi was significantly increased by biochar amendment (LB and HB). LB treatment significantly increased the fungal alpha diversity, while there was no significant change under HB. Furthermore, the dominant bacterial phyla found in the samples were Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Acidobacteria. Biochar addition increased the relative abundance of Actinobacteria in both bulk and rhizosphere soils. The dominant fungal phyla were Ascomycota, Mortierellomycota, and Basidiomycota. The relative abundance of Ascomycota significantly decreased, but Mortierellomycota significantly increased in LB and HB. In addition, redundancy analysis indicated that the changes in bacterial and fungal communities are associated with soil properties such as SOC and TN, which are crucial contributors in regulating the community composition. This study is expected to provide significant theoretical and practical knowledge for the application of biochar in agricultural ecosystem.
Highlights
Biochar is a type of solid product obtained by the thermal decomposition of biomass such as manure, crop straws and sewage sludge under aerobic or anoxic conditions (Lehmann et al, 2006)
The level of AK was higher in HB than the control, while no remarkable changes were observed with LB and biochar compound fertilizer (BCF) when compared to CK
Our study demonstrated that the amendment of biochar and BCF brought significant changes in soil properties and community structure of both bacteria and fungi after 3 years amendment
Summary
Biochar is a type of solid product obtained by the thermal decomposition of biomass such as manure, crop straws and sewage sludge under aerobic or anoxic conditions (Lehmann et al, 2006). As an emerging soil improving material, biochar has some excellent physicochemical properties, like high pH, high carbon content, high surface area, high porosity and large cation adsorption ability, varying depending upon the raw materials and pyrolysis processes (Sun et al, 2016; Zheng et al, 2016; Yao et al, 2017b). The application of biochar amendment to soil has received increasing attention due to its positive influence on improving soil carbon storage and fertility (Yao et al, 2017a; Zhang et al, 2017; Cheng et al, 2019). When compared with the studies on the effects of biochar on the soil physicochemical properties, the effects on soil microbial community in long-term cropland have received much less attention (Zheng et al, 2016; Yu et al, 2018)
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