INTERCROPPING TEA PLANTATIONS WITH SOYBEAN AND RAPESEED ENHANCES NITROGEN FIXATION THROUGH SHIFTS IN SOIL MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES

Highlights

● Intercropping change soil bacterial communities in tea plantations.

● Intercropping increasing nitrogen cycling in the soils of tea plantations.

Abstract

Intercropping with eco-friendly crops is a well-known strategy for improving agriculture sustainability with benefits throughout the soil community, though the range of crop impacts on soil microbiota and extent of feedbacks to crops remain largely unclear. This study evaluated the impacts of different intercropping systems on soil bacterial community composition, diversity, and potential functions in tea gardens. Intercropping systems were found to be significantly influenced soil microbiota. Within the three tested intercropping systems (tea-soybean, tea-rapeseed and tea-soybean-rapeseed), the tea-soybean-rapeseed intercropping system had the most dramatic influence on soil microbiota, with increases in richness accompanied by shifts in the structure of tea garden soil bacterial networks. Specifically, relative abundance of potentially beneficial bacteria associated with essential mineral nutrient cycling increased significantly in the tea-soybean-rapeseed intercropping system. In addition, soil microbial functions related to nutrient cycling functions were significantly enhanced. This was in accordance with increasing relative abundance of nitrogen cycling bacteria, including Burkholderia spp. and Rhodanobacter spp. Based on these results, it is proposed that intercropping tea plantation with soybean and rapeseed may benefit soil microbiota, and thereby promises to be an important strategy for improving soil health in ecologically sound tea production systems.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

intercropping / rapeseed / soil microbe / soybean / tea garden

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Science and Technology Commissioner’s On-site Teaching Renovation and Promotion Project of Nanping City (NP2021KTS05), and the Modern Agricultural Talents Support Project of Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China. We thank Peng Liu for the help in the soil sampling in tea garden in 2019, and Tom Walk for editing the manuscript.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Yongjia Zhong, Lini Liang, Ruineng Xu, Hanyu Xu, Lili Sun, and Hong Liao declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. Sequencing raw data was deposited in the NCBI database under the accession number PRJNA788975. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2022. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)