Soil bacterial community response to cover crops, cover crop termination, and predicted climate conditions

Soil bacterial community response to cover crops, cover crop termination, and predicted climate conditions in a dryland cropping system. We evaluated soil bacterial community responses to contrasting cropping systems in a semiarid agroecosystem close to Havre, Montana. This study focused on a wheat-cover crop rotation that tested two cover crop mixtures (five species planted early season and seven species planted mid-season) with three different termination methods (chemical, grazed, or hayed and baled) against a fallow control under ambient or induced warmer/drier conditions. We hypothesized that 1) the mid-season and early season treatments would have more diverse soil bacterial communities than fallow, 2) on average, ambient conditions would support higher soil bacterial diversity than warmer/drier conditions, and 3) there would be a gradient in soil microbial community diversity from warmer/drier fallow plots terminated by glyphosate (lowest) to ambient cover crop plots terminated by grazing (highest).