Community structure of soil fungi in a novel perennial crop monoculture, annual agriculture, and native prairie reconstruction

Abstract

The use of perennial crop species in agricultural systems may increase ecosystem services and sustainability. Because soil microbial communities play a major role in many processes on which ecosystem services and sustainability depend, characterization of soil community structure in novel perennial crop systems is necessary to understand potential shifts in function and crop responses. Here, we characterized soil fungal community composition at two depths (0-10 and 10-30 cm) in replicated, long-term plots containing one of three different cropping systems: a tilled three-crop rotation of annual crops, a novel perennial crop monoculture (Intermediate wheatgrass, which produces the grain Kernza ® ), and a native prairie reconstruction. The overall fungal community was similar under the perennial monoculture and native vegetation, but both were distinct from those in annual agriculture. The mutualist and saprotrophic community subsets mirrored differences of the overall community, but pathogens were similar among cropping systems. Depth structured overall communities as well as each functional group subset. These results reinforce studies showing strong effects of tillage and sampling depth on soil community structure and suggest plant species diversity may play a weaker role. Similarities in the overall and functional fungal communities between the perennial monoculture and native vegetation suggest Kernza ® cropping systems have the potential to mimic reconstructed natural systems. OPEN ACCESSCitation: McKenna TP, Crews TE, Kemp L, Sikes BA (2020) Community structure of soil fungi in a novel perennial crop monoculture, annual agriculture, and native prairie reconstruction. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0228202. https://doi.org/10.

Perennial grain Kernza® fields have higher particulate organic carbon at depth than annual grain fields

“…The three study sites were chosen for having adjacent plantings of Kernza and annual crops. Two sites were farms, while the third was an experimental research trial including a restored native prairie treatment (McKenna et al 2020). Details on study sites are provided in Table 1.…”

Ecological insights into soil health according to the life-history traits and environment-wide associations of bacteria in agricultural soils

“…Traditional approaches assign a trait using curated databases [41,42], which exclude uncultured or poorly characterized taxa. This is problematic as these unclassified taxa are commonly indicative of properties relevant to soil health [19,37,43,44]. In contrast, EWAS requires no prior knowledge, with information gained for any organism represented in sequencing databases [45][46][47][48].…”

Microbial Community Dynamics of Soybean (Glycine max) Is Affected by Cropping Sequence

“…While our understanding of a corn-soybean crop sequence on soil microbial dynamics is becoming clearer ( Benitez et al, 2017 ; Chamberlain et al, 2020 ), little is known about the effects of canola-soybean or continuous soybean sequences on microbial community composition in the bulk and soybean rhizosphere soil. Furthermore, the majority of published work that investigates the impact of cropping sequence regimes on the soil microbiome focused solely on rhizospheric bacterial communities at a single time-point, while few studies have investigated how the fungal community structure and bulk soil respond to cropping sequence practices over time ( Granzow et al, 2017 ; Liu H. et al, 2019 ; Schmidt et al, 2019 ; McKenna et al, 2020 ).…”