Abstract
Expanding and intensifying agriculture has led to a loss of soil carbon. As agroecosystems cover over 40% of Earth’s land surface, they must be part of the solution put in action to mitigate climate change. Development of efficient management practices to maximize soil carbon retention is currently limited, in part, by a poor understanding of how plants, which input carbon to soil, and microbes, which determine its fate there, interact. Here we implement a diversity gradient by intercropping undersown species with barley in a large field trial, ranging from one to eight undersown species. We find that increasing plant diversity strengthens positive associations within the rhizosphere soil microbial community in relation to negative associations. These associations, in turn, enhance community carbon use efficiency. Jointly, our results highlight how increasing plant diversity in agriculture can be used as a management strategy to enhance carbon retention potential in agricultural soils. The expansion and intensification of agriculture has led to a loss of soil carbon. Here the authors show that increasing plant diversity within an agricultural soil increases positive associations within the soil microbial community, which increases carbon use efficiency.
Abstract from the paper’s OpenAlex record; open copy licensed cc-by-nc-nd. Read at the source ↗
The text the model read, with the source record’s inline markup (italics, sub- and superscripts) rendered and its character entities decoded; quote offsets refer to the raw text.
Claims 3
Claim · model-written summary
Increasing plant diversity strengthened positive relative to negative rhizosphere microbial associations.
- Taxon
- barley
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Hordeum vulgaree1 - Treatment
- increasing plant diversitye0
- Outcome
- positive associations within the rhizosphere soil microbial communitye0
- Direction
- strengthense0
- Setting
- large field triale1
Not reportedComparator
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
.jpg?width=500)
Verbatim
e0“increasing plant diversity strengthens positive associations within the rhizosphere soil microbial community in relation to negative associations”
e1“intercropping undersown species with barley in a large field trial”
Claim · model-written summary
Positive microbial associations enhanced community carbon use efficiency.
- Outcome
- community carbon use efficiencye0
- Direction
- enhancee0
- Qualifier
- positive associations within the rhizosphere soil microbial communitye1
Not reportedTaxon
Verbatim
e0“These associations, in turn, enhance community carbon use efficiency.”
e1“positive associations within the rhizosphere soil microbial community”
Claim · model-written summary
Increasing agricultural plant diversity can be used to enhance soil carbon retention potential.
- Outcome
- increasing plant diversity in agriculturee0
- Qualifier
- enhance carbon retention potential in agricultural soilse0
Not reportedTaxon
Verbatim
e0“increasing plant diversity in agriculture can be used as a management strategy to enhance carbon retention potential in agricultural soils”