Effect of conservation tillage on seedling emergence and crop growth-evidences from UAV observations

Abstract

Over the past decades, intensive reclamation has caused significant land degradation, threatening both ecological and food security. The Chinese government has taken a series of novel Conservation Tillage (CT) measures according to regional climate and soil conditions to increase agriculture’s multifunctional and resilience. Previous studies have reported CT in northeast China can improve soil organic carbon and reduce ammonia emissions in northeast China. However, whether the regionally adapted CT can avoid its inherent limitations in seed emergence and crop growth is still lacking comprehensive understanding and investigation. By using high-resolution and time-series Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) observations, our study investigated and evaluated the performance of different advanced and regional adapted CT treatments in crop emergence and growth compared with conventional tillage during the whole growing season. Based on the field measurements, we found that although the residues can impact the seed emergence, there was no significant difference between CT treatments and conventional tillage, with some CT treatments can even raise the emergence rate. We also found that the high residues covered CT treatments obstructed the maize grown in the early growing season including the V3 and V6 period, while the crop growth in these treatments caught up with the conventional tillage in the following growing periods. Our study suggested that well-adjusted CT treatments in Northeast China have the potential to maintain crop production accompanied by enhancing the ecosystem’s multifunctionality. The results from this study provided observational evidence of crop growth impact from CT, which will have great implications in convincing the farmers and beneficial to the promotion of conservation tillage.

Keywords:

• conservation tillage
• crop residues
• tillage effects
• plant growth
• remote sensing
• maize

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program (A) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA28080503), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42071025), the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of Chinese Academy of Sciences (2023240) and the Scientific and Technological Development Program of Jilin Province (20220101154JC). We thank Aizhen Liang, Dandan Huang, Yan Zhang, and Xuewen Chen from the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, for their guidance of detailed information about each conservational tillage technology in this study.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program (A) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences [XDA28080503]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [42071025].