Impact of agricultural practices and environmental variables on plant-parasitic nematode communities in fields at a landscape scale

Abstract

Agricultural practices shaping plant-parasitic nematode (PPN) assembly are still unclear, and this limits our understanding of the impact of anthropic disturbances on the resilience of PPN communities and the emergence of agronomic problems. Here the abundance and diversity of PPN in France’s oilseed rape production area was determined by sampling 72 fields over two consecutive years. We identified and counted PPN taxa and collected anthropic and environmental variables for the past 5 years. PPN were assigned to seven genera and one family including PPN that have not been identified to genus level. Using multiple correspondence analyses, we selected the main variables and tested their effect on the abundance of each taxon with mixed generalised linear models. We emphasise that at the landscape scale investigated, crop rotations were no longer a major factor impacting the PPN communities. However, we observed that tillage and pesticides had a significant impact on several taxa.