Abstract
Better understanding of soil C dynamics under actual agricultural conditions is important for predicting impacts of land use and climate change on soil C sequestration. Few field studies have compared simultaneous decomposition of intact roots and surface shoot residues under no-till (NT) field conditions. Therefore, we estimated the actual decomposition of intact roots and shoot residues simultaneously under NT field conditions. Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), pea (Pisum sativum L.), and vetch (Vicia sativa L.) plants were grown inside polyvinyl chloride (PVC) cylinders hydraulically forced into a field of sandy loam-textured Typic Paleudalf. After 20 days of emergence, the crops were pulse labeled weekly with 13CO2 until flowering. At harvest, the treatments were designed by combining 13C-labeled shoots with unlabeled roots and unlabeled shoots with 13C-labeled roots, resulting in six treatments (two combinations × three species), plus a non-amended control treatment. Soil CO2 emissions were measured continuously by the alkaline trap method during 180 days. Apparent C mineralization was similar for the three species in paired treatments: 54 ± 8.8 % added C for wheat, 54 ± 3.4 % for pea and 51 ± 3.4 % for vetch. However, actual mineralization of the roots 13C was higher than that of the 13C shoots, for the three species (73 vs. 45 % initial C for wheat, 76 vs. 48 % for pea, and 73 vs. 51 % for vetch). These findings emphasize that the environmental drivers of decomposition, i.e., the crop residue location, their contact with soil, and the soil moisture and temperature, are important factors that significantly promote root decomposition in situ compared to shoots, negating the consequences of their different initial chemical composition on their kinetics of decomposition.
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Acknowledgments
The first author’s doctoral study was funded by a CNPq-TWAS postgraduate fellowship program. This work was supported by the Brazilian government through the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnologico (CNPq) and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (FAPERGS). The bilateral Brazilian and French collaboration was funded under Program CNPq—Ciência sem Fronteiras Process Number 401724/2012-3. CN-MIP project (ANR-13-JFAC-0001) provided a grant to M.M. Tahir for his leave at INRA, Reims, France. We thank Prof. Dr. Paulo Ivonir Gubiani for his help with equations and André Friderichs for the 13C isotopic analysis. We thank Dr. Denis Angers from AAC for his insightful comments on a previous version of this work.
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Tahir, M.M., Recous, S., Aita, C. et al. In situ roots decompose faster than shoots left on the soil surface under subtropical no-till conditions. Biol Fertil Soils 52, 853–865 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00374-016-1125-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00374-016-1125-5