Responses of soil microbial community characteristics and enzyme activities to different irrigation modes over four wheat-maize rotation seasons

Dongfeng Ning, Qisheng Han, Yingying Zhang, Anzhen Qin, Zhandong Liu, Jiyang Zhang and Yang Gao

Agricultural Water Management, 2024, vol. 306, issue C

Abstract: Water scarcity in arid and semiarid areas highlights the importance of developing water-saving irrigation techniques. Soil extracellular enzyme activities (EEAs) and microbes are important for soil biochemical cycles and plant growth. However, little is understood about how soil EEAs, and microbial communities respond to water-saving irrigation systems and levels. Therefore, a field experiment was carried out over four consecutive wheat-maize seasons to explore the effects of surface irrigation (SI) and drip irrigation (DI) coupled with different irrigation levels (i.e. 65, 50, 35 and 20 mm/event, represents sufficient, mild deficit, moderate deficit and serious deficit irrigation, respectively) on the plant biomass, soil properties, soil EEAs, and bacterial community. The results revealed that mild deficit irrigation showed no significant impact on plant biomass, serious and moderate deficit irrigation significantly decreased crop biomass by 49.0 % and 26.6 %, respectively, compared with sufficient irrigation. However, the crop biomass of serious and moderate deficit irrigation under DI were 15.4 % and 17.4 % higher, respectively, than that under SI. Serious and moderate deficit irrigation significantly increased soil available K accumulation and soil urease activity, decreased bacterial richness, and shifted the bacterial community structure. No significant differences were found between mild deficit and sufficient irrigation. The relative abundances of Firmicutes, Gemmatimonadota, and Myxococcota significantly increased under serious deficit irrigation, while Acidobacteriota significantly decreased. Moderate deficit irrigation under DI did not shift bacterial community structure, while under SI did. Soil pH, electrical conductivity (EC), available K, and plant biomass were the major factors influencing the bacterial community compositions. Serious deficit irrigation reduced the complexity and stability of the soil bacterial co-occurrence network. The network of DI had more significant interactions among bacteria than the SI. Therefore, DI coupled with moderate deficit irrigation is more beneficial to maintain crop yield and the stability of bacterial community structure than SI.

Keywords: Drip irrigation; Deficit irrigation; Soil enzyme activities; Bacterial communities; Co-occurrence networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037837742400502X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:306:y:2024:i:c:s037837742400502x

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2024.109166

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().