Abstract
Miscanthus is a promising high-yielding and low-input perennial biomass crop. However, as miscanthus does not produce nectar, it provides less support for pollinators than other perennial biomass crops, such as cup plant, Virginia mallow, or wild plant mixtures. This study discusses whether miscanthus could be intercropped with flower-rich biennial wild plants to further enhance its ecological functioning. In 2017, a demonstration plot was established in southwest Germany with two miscanthus intercropping regimes: woad (WAM) and yellow melilot (YAM). Both woad and melilot reached full bloom in 2018, the second year of cultivation. The flowering period of woad started and ended earlier than that of melilot. Woad remained harvestable until spring 2019, whereas the aboveground melilot was destroyed by brown hare in autumn 2018. However, the shed seeds of melilot reemerged homogeneously in 2019. The miscanthus developed better in YAM than WAM. This was most likely due to (i) stronger competition for water, nutrients, and light in WAM and (ii) nitrogen fixation advantage in melilot. These results indicate that the ecological performance of miscanthus could be improved by intercropping with melilot. Thus, we propose to further investigate the effects of intercropping on both the productivity and quality of miscanthus biomass.
Highlights
The supply of sustainably produced biomass is currently one of the major challenges for the developing bioeconomy in Europe [1,2,3]
Compared with external input intensive crop cultivation on good agricultural land, these enable more social-ecologically benign biomass production with (i) less negative environmental externalities [13] and (ii) less land use competition with food crop cultivation, because they can grow on marginal agricultural land, such as erosion-prone sites, contaminated sites, or sandy soil [14,15,16]
Successful intercropping of miscanthus with yellow melilot could important additional benefit of yellow melilot and miscanthus (YAM) for open-land animals: the miscanthus improve the biodiversity conservation effects and landscape appearance of miscanthus compared provides shelter and the yellow melilot provides food, whereas woad does not seem to provide any with miscanthus cultivated alone and miscanthus intercropped with Woad and Miscanthus (WAM)
Summary
The supply of sustainably produced biomass is currently one of the major challenges for the developing bioeconomy in Europe [1,2,3]. While the demand for biomass from industrial crops is expected to further increase in the future [4], agrobiodiversity has already started to decrease at alarming rates over the past two centuries [5,6,7] For this reason, farmers need to adapt their agricultural practices in order to improve ecosystem services, such as food and shelter for open-land animals and pollinators. If good agricultural practices are adhered to [16,35], the cultivation of miscanthus can provide the opportunity to halt the land degradation process and even restore degraded land by reducing soil erosion and improving long-term soil fertility, respectively [36,37,38,39] This is becoming ever more relevant in the face of a changing climate, e.g., an increase of temperature and precipitation patterns [40,41,42,43,44], because it helps maintain agroecosystem resilience [45,46].
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