Effects of fertilizer and weed species richness on soil nematode community in a microcosm field experiment

Xinli Niu,Xiaopei Feng,Yongfan Cheng,Yanfang Gu,Feng Sun

doi:10.1007/s42832-021-0123-1

Xinli Niu, Xiaopei Feng + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s42832-021-0123-1

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Abstract

Both fertilizer and plant species richness may affect the soil nematode community. However, the influence of fertilizer and weed species richness interaction is unclear. Nematode abundance and biodiversity in wheat and weed plots soil treated with nitrogen, phosphate and potassium fertilizer addition and weed species richness (0, 1, 2 and 4 weed levels) were investigated in a long-term microcosm experiment established in 2010 at Kaifeng, China. The results demonstrated that fertilizer treatment increased the abundance of total nematode, bacterivores, and plant parasites whereas it decreased the total genera number, the Shannon—Wiener diversity index (H′), Margalef richness index (SR), the total maturity index (ΣMI), and structure index (SI), and degraded the structure of the nematode community. In contrast, weed species richness increased these ecological indices and enhanced the structure of the nematode community. Principal component analysis (PCA) indicated that the fertilizer’s effect was more significant than weed species richness. Redundancy analysis (RDA) demonstrated that fertilizer affected soil nematode mainly through increasing soil available phosphorus by 4.71 times and ammonium nitrogen content by 74.03%; weed species richness increased the diversity indices of soil nematode mainly through enhancing soil moisture by 2.07%. Our results suggest weed species richness may relieve the negative effect of fertilizer on the diversity of soil nematode community.

Highlights

Soil nematodes are the most abundant mesofauna and occupy important positions at most trophic levels in the soil food web (Yeates, 2003)
Our result indicated that the control treatments have higher nematode diversities in agreement with a previous study (Lenz and Eisenbeis, 2000).The lower SR in the NPK fertilizer treatments indicates a less complicated community structure, and the lower E showed the uneven distribution of soil nematode
Our results demonstrated that long-term fertilizer addition in agroecosystem increased soil nematode abundance, whereas it decreased the ecological indices of soil nematode community and degraded the soil food web

Summary

Introduction

Soil nematodes are the most abundant mesofauna and occupy important positions at most trophic levels in the soil food web (Yeates, 2003). Previous field studies focused on the effects of NPK fertilizer on soil nematode abundance and the diversity index of soil nematode community, and have revealed different results. NPK fertilizer decreased the nematode maturity index (Forge et al, 2005) and had no impact on the nematode diversity (Zhang et al, 2009). These results indicated that the effect of fertilizer on soil nematode community depends on the specific environment. A recent study indicated that fertilization patterns (control, inorganic fertilizers, and mixed fertilizers) had a greater influence on the nematode gut microbiome than fertilization duration (Zheng et al, 2020)

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