No-tillage leads to a higher resistance but a lower resilience of soil multifunctionality than ridge tillage in response to dry-wet disturbances

Abstract

Soils simultaneously provide multiple ecosystem functions (i.e. multifunctionality) which are of critical importance in terms of climate regulation and fertility maintenance. Although the influence of tillage practices on many soil functions is well documented, its effect on the resistance and resilience of these functions to climate change from a ‘holistic ecosystem’ view remains poorly understood. In this study, we compared the resistance and resilience to dry-wet cycles, which is predicted to be more frequent and intensified in agricultural soils under climate change, of soil multifunctionality under no-tillage and ridge tillage. We found that no-tillage led to a higher resistance but a lower resilience of soil multifunctionality than ridge tillage in response to dry-wet disturbances. Variation partitioning analysis and mantel correlation between dissimilarity matrices showed that the resistance and resilience of soil multifunctionality was closely related to soil microbial diversity. Soil pH also contributed to the variation in stability of soil multifunctionality, but its explanatory power was much lower than microbial diversity. Our results suggest that tillage practices strongly affect the resistance and resilience of soil multifunctionality to dry-wet cycles, which might exert important consequences for ecosystem services that delivered by agricultural soils under climate change.