Fungal community shifts in soils with varied cover crop treatments and edaphic properties.

Cover cropping is proposed to enhance soil microbial diversity and activity, with cover crop type affecting microbial groups in different ways. We compared fungal community compositions of bulk soils differing by cover crop treatment, season, and edaphic properties in the third year of an organic, conventionally tilled rotation of corn-soybean-wheat planted with winter cover crops. We used Illumina amplicon sequencing fungal assemblages to evaluate effects of nine treatments, each replicated four times, consisting of six single winter cover crop species, a three-species mixture, a six-species mixture, and fallow.

Managing nitrogen through cover crop species selection in the U.S. mid-Atlantic.

Cover crops have the potential to be agricultural nitrogen (N) regulators that reduce leaching through soils and then deliver N to subsequent cash crops. Yet, regulating N in this way has proven difficult because the few cover crop species that are well-studied excel at either reducing N leaching or increasing N supply to cash crops, but they fail to excel at both simultaneously. We hypothesized that mixed species cover crop stands might balance the N fixing and N scavenging capabilities of individual species.

Drivers of nitrogen dynamics in ecologically based agriculture revealed by long-term, high-frequency field measurements.

Nitrogen (N) loss from agriculture impacts ecosystems worldwide. One strategy to mitigate these losses, ecologically based nutrient management (ENM), seeks to recouple carbon (C) and N cycles to reduce environmental losses and supply N to cash crops. However, our capacity to apply ENM is limited by a lack of field-based high-resolution data on N dynamics in actual production contexts.