Abstract
A healthy soil acts as a dynamic living system that delivers multiple ecosystem services, such as sustaining water quality and plant productivity, controlling soil nutrient recycling decomposition, and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Soil health is closely associated with sustainable agriculture, because soil microorganism diversity and activity are the main components of soil health. Agricultural sustainability is defined as the ability of a crop production system to continuously produce food without environmental degradation. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), cyanobacteria, and beneficial nematodes enhance water use efficiency and nutrient availability to plants, phytohormones production, soil nutrient cycling, and plant resistance to environmental stresses. Farming practices have shown that organic farming and tillage improve soil health by increasing the abundance, diversity, and activity of microorganisms. Conservation tillage can potentially increase grower’s profitability by reducing inputs and labor costs as compared to conventional tillage while organic farming might add extra management costs due to high labor demands for weeding and pest control, and for fertilizer inputs (particularly N-based), which typically have less consistent uniformity and stability than synthetic fertilizers. This review will discuss the external factors controlling the abundance of rhizosphere microbiota and the impact of crop management practices on soil health and their role in sustainable crop production.
Highlights
Soil health has been defined by Doran and Zeiss [1] as “the capacity of a soil to function as a vital living system within ecosystem and land use boundaries to sustain plant and animal production, maintain or enhance water and air quality, and promote plant and animal health.”
It has been shown that populations of soil microorganisms such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), active bacteria, and beneficial nematode are highly correlated with crop yield, fruit quality, soil water storage, and nutrient cycling, playing key roles in improving plant health and soil fertility [1,10,15]
Soil health and soil quality terms were used as measurements of soil status, and their assessment is aimed to monitor the influence of present, past, and the future of land use on agricultural sustainability [37]
Summary
Soil health has been defined by Doran and Zeiss [1] as “the capacity of a soil to function as a vital living system within ecosystem and land use boundaries to sustain plant and animal production, maintain or enhance water and air quality, and promote plant and animal health.” Soil health is an intrinsic characteristic of a soil. Sustainable agriculture has been defined as an alternative integrated approach that could be used to solve fundamental and applied issues related to food production in an ecological way [7] It integrates biological, physical, chemical and ecological principles to develop new practices that are not harmful to the environment [2]. Soil health assessment is based on soil quality variables that guarantee sustainability of crop production in agricultural lands [1,9]. It has been shown that populations of soil microorganisms such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), active bacteria, and beneficial nematode are highly correlated with crop yield, fruit quality, soil water storage, and nutrient cycling, playing key roles in improving plant health and soil fertility [1,10,15]. It is intended to provide a better understanding of soil rhizosphere microbiota and the external factors controlling their abundance and diversity
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