About this Research Topic

Background

In the coming decades, agriculture will face major challenges, as it has to increase crop productivity per land unit to feed the global growing population while reducing its footprint on the environment. Global climatic changes, scarcity of arable lands, and limited non-renewable resources alongside multiple environmental pressures will add another level of complexity to sustain agroecosystems. To achieve global food security under these pressures, agriculture should require both healthy and productive agroecosystems wherein aboveground and belowground interactions in staple crops are optimized to eco-intensify crop production. Belowground biotic interactions that involve both roots, soil fauna, and microbes with beneficial traits offer important opportunities to maximize the rhizosphere functionalities thus promoting crop growth, nutrient uptake, and alleviation of stress. With the advances of knowledge and technologies, there is a myriad of possibilities for enhancing sustainable crop production while fostering ecosystem service provision. This unquestionably requires an improved understanding of belowground interactions that are responsible for higher rhizosphere optimization, nutrient use eco-efficiency, and crop productivity.

The goal of this Research Topic is to explore how the diverse actors of roots physio-biochemistry and associated microbiomes at the rhizosphere interface support nutrient use efficiency. This also includes other traits related to extensive rooting system and its spatial distribution, root exudates, rhizosphere acidification, facilitation of nutrient dynamics, hyper-nodulation in legume crops and beneficial plant growth-promoting rhizosphere microbes that are among the most important plant-related belowground traits that contribute to higher nutrient use eco-efficiency.

In this Research Topic, we welcome the submission of manuscripts (original research, reviews, and opinions) related but not limited to the following topics:

• Optimization of the rhizosphere “roots- and microbes”- related activities for enhancing nutrient (with emphasis on P, N, and water) use eco-efficiency
• Land management practices (e.g. organic amendments, cover crops, fertilizer, irrigation, and tillage) that affect soil physiochemical properties, the rhizosphere-soil microbiome and root physio-biochemistry controlling crop macro- and micro-nutrient uptake mechanisms, retention and loss pathways of N and P, and the linkages between rhizosphere nutrient cycling and plant uptake
• Interactions between soil-root-mycorrhizas in modulating plant to soil organic and inorganic nutrient pools
• Process oriented and microbial-based modeling to scale site-specific results to landscape levels in order to refine land management practices that increase food nutrient density and reduce negative environmental impacts
• Environmental changes on the sustainability and resilience of belowground ecology.

Keywords: crops, eco-efficiency, nutrients, microbiome, rhizosphere, roots

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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