Moss-dominated biocrust-based biodiversity enhances carbon sequestration via water interception and plant-soil-microbe interactions

Summary We investigated a nature-based solution (NbS) via incorporating biocrust into alfalfa-maize intercropping system to test carbon sequestration in seriously eroded agricultural soils. Field investigation showed that the NbS (moss-dominated biocrust + intercropping) massively lowered surface soil erosion by 94.5% and soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) loss by 94.7 and 96.8% respectively, while promoting rainwater interception by 82.2% relative to bare land (CK). There generally existed positive interactions between biocrust and cropping in the integrated standing biodiversity system. Enhanced plant biomass input into soils substantially promoted soil fungal community diversity and abundance under NbS (p < 0.05). This enabled NbS to evidently improve soil macroaggregate proportion and mean weight diameter. Critically, topsoil carbon storage was increased by 2.5 and 10.7%, compared with CK and pure intercropping (p < 0.05). Conclusively, the standing diversity under such NbS fostered soil C sequestration via water interception and plant-soil-microbe interactions in degraded agricultural soils.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  iScience

• Publication date

  2022-12-01

• Fields of study

  Agricultural and Food Sciences, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.isci.2022.105773PMID 36590166PMCID 9800303
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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