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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Agron.
Sec. Plant-Soil Interactions
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fagro.2024.1446404

Crop-specific response of soil prokaryotic community to long-term intensification management: The importance of crop phase at sampling

Provisionally accepted
Juan Frene Juan Frene 1Silvina Bacigaluppo Silvina Bacigaluppo 2Mariana Maury Mariana Maury 3Jimena Ortiz Jimena Ortiz 3Maximo L Rivarola Maximo L Rivarola 4Fernando Salvagiotti Fernando Salvagiotti 2Valeria S Faggioli Valeria S Faggioli 1*
  • 1 Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (Argentina), Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • 2 Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA), Oliveros, Oliveros, Santa Fe, Argentina
  • 3 Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (EEA Marcos Juárez), Marcos Juarez, Argentina
  • 4 National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The ecosystem services provided by soil microbial communities are critical for the resilience of agroecosystems, ensuring environmental conservation and food security. Long-term experiments comparing contrasting crop rotations are valuable tools for monitoring microbial responses, but they rarely include all crop phases within a single year. Therefore, the long-term agronomic impact may be masked by the immediate effect of the crop evaluated. In this study, we compared different crop rotations based on the Intensification Sequence Index (ISI), which considers the soil occupation time, and analyzed the impact of cover crops and two nitrogen fertilization strategies.We used an experiment initiated in 2006 with the following crop rotations: Soybean-Soybean, Maize-Wheat/Soybean, and Maize-Soybean-Wheat/Soybean. Soil samples were taken after the harvest of each summer crop phase (i.e., Soybean, Maize, Wheat/Soybean), and the soil prokaryotic community was monitored using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. We observed that ISI and crop phase were the main predictors of microbial community composition, explaining 14.7% and 13.0% of the variation, respectively. Nitrogen fertilization had a minor effect (3.12%) and was detected only after maize sampling; cover crops had no significant effect. However, the presence of cover crops showed higher alpha diversity and an increased abundance of Proteobacteria.Maize enriched the abundance of certain taxa of Planctomycetes and Verrucomicrobia, while Soybean increased the abundance of Bacteroidetes and Proteobacteria. Comparatively, Soybean enriched Mucilaginibacter and Geobacter, while Wheat/Soybean enriched Brevundimonas and Roseimicrobium. Our results demonstrate that crop phase is as important as the long-term legacy of crop rotations in shaping the microbial community and that specific taxa responses are highly dependent on the crop phase surveyed.

    Keywords: soil microbiome, Maize, Soybean, wheat, Cover crops, N fertilization

    Received: 09 Jun 2024; Accepted: 28 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Frene, Bacigaluppo, Maury, Ortiz, Rivarola, Salvagiotti and Faggioli. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Valeria S Faggioli, Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (Argentina), Buenos Aires, Argentina

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