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.

Underexplored microbial metabolisms for enhanced nutrient recycling in agricultural soils.

Worldwide, arable soils have been degraded through erosion and exhaustive cultivation, and substantial proportions of fertilizer nutrients are not taken up by crops. A central challenge in agriculture is to understand how soils and resident microbial communities can be managed to deliver nutrients to crops more efficiently with minimal losses to the environment. Throughout much of the twentieth century, intensive farming has caused substantial loss of organic matter and soil biological function.