Abstract
Tillage can strongly affect the long-term productivity of an agricultural system by altering the composition and spatial distribution of nutrients and microbial communities. The impact of tillage methods on the vertical distribution of soil microbial communities is not well understood, and the correlation between microbial communities and soil nutrients vertical distributions is also not clear. In the present study, we investigated the effects of conventional plowing tillage (CT: moldboard plowing), reduced tillage (RT: rotary tillage), and no tillage (NT) on the composition of bacterial and fungal communities within the soil profile (0–5, 5–10, 10–20, and 20–30 cm) using high-throughput sequencing of the microbial 16S/ITS gene. Microbial communities differed by soil properties and sampling depth. Tillage treatment strongly affected the microbial community structure and distribution by soil depth, and changed the vertical distribution of soil bacterial and fungal communities differently. Depth decay of bacterial communities was significantly smaller in CT than in RT and NT, and that of fungal communities were significantly greater in RT than CT and NT. The presence/absence of species was the main contributing factor for the vertical variation of bacterial communities, whereas for fungal communities the main factor was the difference in relative abundance of the species, suggesting niche-based process was more important for bacterial than fungal community in structuring the vertical distribution. Soil total carbon was correlated more with soil bacterial (especially the anaerobic and facultatively anaerobic groups) than with fungal community. These results suggested different roles of bacteria and fungi in carbon sequestration of crop residue and in shaping soil carbon distribution, which might impact on soil fertility.
Highlights
Tillage practices can affect the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soil and have a strong impact on the health and productivity of agricultural ecosystems
Soil pH increased with soil depth, and soil total carbon (TC), total nitrogen (TN), Soil organic carbon (SOC), and AK decreased from the shallow layer to the deep layer
The no tillage (NT) treatment resulted in the highest TN within the four layers, and there was no significant difference between the conventional plowing tillage (CT) and reduced tillage (RT) treatments
Summary
Tillage practices can affect the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soil and have a strong impact on the health and productivity of agricultural ecosystems. It has been established that tillage methods could influence the vertical distribution of soil microbial communities; few studies have focused on the extent that the distribution of microbial communities within the soil profile has been altered under different tillage regimes. For this purpose, we developed a new concept called depth decay, in which the degrees of changes in both soil nutrients and microbial communities caused by different tillage methods could be assessed
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