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. 2019 Jul 22:7:e7351.
doi: 10.7717/peerj.7351. eCollection 2019.

Comprehensive assessment of paddy soil quality under land consolidation: a novel perspective of microbiology

Yaoben Lin  1   2 , Yanmei Ye  1   2 , Cifang Wu  1   2 , Jianhui Yang  3 , Yiming Hu  1   2 , Haokun Shi  1   2
Affiliations

Comprehensive assessment of paddy soil quality under land consolidation: a novel perspective of microbiology

Yaoben Lin et al. PeerJ. .

Abstract

Soil quality assessment is an important means to demonstrate how effective land consolidation is. However, the existing assessment system is not sufficient to reflect actual soil quality. So, the purpose of this study is to integrate abiological and biological indicators into a comprehensive assessment to evaluate the paddy soil quality under different land consolidation practices. Soil samples were collected from 35 paddy sites under different land consolidation practices including land merging, land leveling (LL), ditch construction (DC) and application of organic fertilizer (AO). A total of 10 paddy sites were selected under conventional tillage (CT) from non-land consolidation area as a control group in Y county, China. The results indicated that soil organic matter (OM), total nitrogen (TN), available phosphorus, bacterial functional diversity (BFD), bacterial and fungal abundances were significantly improved. Fields under LL, among all the land consolidation practices, might still face the risk of land degradation caused by low TN, OM and microbial diversity. High microbial biomass, BFD and OM were significantly higher in fields under AO in nutrient cycle. According to the results of comprehensive assessment, the samples with severe heavy metal contamination and low microbial diversity were generally concentrated in CT. These results indicated that land consolidation was an efficient technique to improve soil quality and could achieve higher quality of agricultural products.

Keywords: Comprehensive assessment; Land consolidation; Microbiology; Soil quality.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. The microbial abundance and diversity for all soil samples.
Box plots and dots explain the Shannon and Chao indices of bacteria (A) and fungi (B), respectively.
Figure 2
Figure 2. The structure of main soil bacteria (A) and fungi (B) under different land consolidation practices.
Figure 3
Figure 3. The relative abundance of beneficial bacteria (A) and fungi (B) in the soils under different land consolidation practices.
Figure 4
Figure 4. The abundance of functions inferred by PICRUSt in the soil samples under different land consolidation practices.
Figure 5
Figure 5. The value of PB and the individual contribution of MDS indicators under different land consolidation practices.
Figure 6
Figure 6. The GI values (A) and PA values (B) under different land consolidation practices.
Error bars indicate the standard deviation of the sample values. Different letters on the bars indicate significant difference at p < 0.05.
Figure 7
Figure 7. The indexes changing tendency of all paddy soil samples (A) and the PSQ values under different land consolidation practices (B).
Figure 8
Figure 8. Effects of environmental factors on the community structures of dominant bacteria and fungi on phylum level by spearman analysis.
The figure shows the correlation between environmental factors and microorganisms, with warm tone indicating positive correlation and cool tone indicating negative correlation. (A) Bacterial phyla in land consolidation area. (B) Fungal phyla in land consolidation area. (C) Bacterial phyla in conventional tillage area. (D) Fungal phyla in conventional tillage area. *Indicate 0.01 < p ≤ 0.05, **indicate 0.001 < p ≤ 0.01, ***indicate p ≤ 0.001.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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