Abstract
Conservative agricultural practices have been adopted to improve soil quality and maintain crop productivity. An efficient intercropping of maize with mushroom has been developed in Northeast China. The objective of this study was to evaluate and compare the effects of planting patterns on the diversity and structure of the soil bacterial communities at a 0–20 cm depth in the black soil zone of Northeast China. The experiment consisted of monoculture of maize and mushroom, and intercropping in a split-plot arrangement. The characteristics of soil microbial communities were performed by 16S rRNA gene amplicom sequencing. The results showed that intercropping increased soil bacterial richness and diversity compared with maize monoculture. The relative abundances of Acidobacteria, Chloroflexi, Saccharibacteria and Planctomycetes were significantly higher, whereas Proteobacteria and Firmicutes were lower in intercropping than maize monoculture. Redundancy analysis suggested that pH, NO3−-N and NH4+-N contents had a notable effect on the structure of the bacterial communities. Moreover, intercropping significantly increased the relative abundance of carbohydrate metabolism pathway functional groups. Overall, these findings demonstrated that intercropping of maize with mushroom strongly impacts the physical and chemical properties of soil as well as the diversity and structure of the soil bacterial communities, suggesting this is a sustainable agricultural management practice in Northeast China.
Highlights
Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the three major food crops in the world, and a high-quality animal feed and an important industrial raw material
13 phyla, 31 classes, 64 orders, and 84 families in the bacterial community were significantly affected by planting pattern
Our study showed that the relative abundance of glycan and secondary metabolites functional groups in intercropping and mushroom monoculture significantly increased compared with maize monoculture
Summary
Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the three major food crops in the world, and a high-quality animal feed and an important industrial raw material. The maize planting pattern in Northeast China was mainly based upon conventional agricultural practices (e.g., monoculture cropping, tillage and removal of crop residues) that have caused soil erosion, fertility decline, and loss of soil biodiversity [2]. Conservation and sustainable agricultural practices, such as intercropping, no tillage and mulching, have been adopted to improve soil quality and increase crop productivity. Intercropping, a method of simultaneously planting two or more crops on the same field, has been practiced in many countries for several decades [3]. It increases the productivity per unit of land through better utilization of resources, control of disease and reducing soil erosion [4].
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