Response of microbial community diversity and subsoil properties to cow manure amendment in mollisols

ABSTRACT

Subsoil fertilization can help agricultural sustainability, but this is not a widely adopted practice. Here, we conducted a pot experiment to study the response of microbial community diversity and topsoil/subsoil properties to cow manure amendment. Our results show that amending subsoil with cow manure (SM) increased available phosphorus (AP) and humic acid (HA) content and the ratio of humic acid to fulvic acid (HA/FA) by 22.2%, 17.7%, and 49.3%, respectively, relative to manure-amended topsoil (TM) (p < 0.05). SM was also more favorable for organic matter degradation and had 61.9%, 21.7%, and 85.3% higher relative abundances of the bacterial phyla Bacteroidetes and Actinobacteria and the order Cytophagales, respectively, relative to the TM treatment (p < 0.05). Compared with that of unamended subsoil (S), the Chao1 index, operational taxonomic units, and Shannon index of fungi were increased but bacterial diversity was decreased by SM treatment (p < 0.05). The only significant difference of the TM-treated soil with the unamended topsoil (T) was a lower bacterial Shannon index (p < 0.05). In conclusion, soil physicochemical properties and subsoil microbial communities were sensitive to cow manure amendment, which has the potential to improve the productivity of subsoils.

KEYWORDS:

• Soil properties
• subsoil
• fungal diversity
• bacterial diversity
• cow manure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors’ contributions

Daowei Zhou designed the study; Juan Hu acquired the funding, collected field data, carried out statistical analyses and drafted the manuscript; Qiang Li supervised the study design and critically revised the manuscript. Rongzhen Zhong and Chengzhen Zhao participated in data analysis. All authors gave final approval for publication and agree to be held accountable for the work performed therein.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA28110202), and the Open Research Fund of Key Laboratory of Mollisols Agroecology, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2020ZKHT-04).