Impact of soil inoculation on crop residue breakdown and carbon and nitrogen cycling in organically and conventionally managed agricultural soils

Organic agriculture relies on organic fertilizers and amendments to provide nutrients to plants and will therefore depend on decomposer communities to release nutrients from these organic inputs. However, after conversion of conventional to organic agriculture it may take up to decades before decomposer communities become adapted to the new resource inputs. The aim of the present study is to investigate if the functional capacity of soil communities for decomposing recalcitrant crop residue types can be enhanced by inoculating soil communities from organically into conventionally managed soils. We used a microcosm incubation experiment to test how soil inoculation, agricultural management history, and crop residue type affect carbon and nitrogen cycling with crop residue addition. We collected soil samples from 5 pairs of conventional and nearby organic fields and set up a reciprocal inoculation experiment under controlled lab conditions. We inoculated soil from each conventional field ..., We sampled ten fields in the east of the Netherlands. Five organic and five conventionally managed arable fields that were a subselection from the Chronosequence 2017 (sampled 1.5 years earlier).
These soil samples are characterized.
Then; we used these soils for an mesocosm incubation experiment; see material and methods section below.
We set up a 34-day incubation experiment of soils from fields with contrasting arable management (organic vs conventional) and inoculated each soil with a 10% inoculum from the contrasting management regime. We then added plant residues ranging in recalcitrance (based on lignin content and C:N ratio) and measured litter mass loss, C respiration at different time points, and potential cumulative plant available nitrogen using resin bags. Before and directly after the experiment we determined permanganate-oxidizable carbon (POXC) as an indicator for carbon stabilization and substrate induced respiration (SIR) as a proxy for microbial biomass (Hurisso et al..., , # Impact of soil inoculation on crop residue breakdown and carbon and nitrogen cycling in organically and conventionally managed agricultural soils

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.70rxwdc72](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.70rxwdc72)

## Description of the data and file structure

This README_VRijsselKoorneef_2024_VitalSoilsChronosequencedataNIOO2017.txt file was generated on 2024-03-07 by Sophie Quirina van Rijssel

GENERAL INFORMATION

1\. Title of Dataset: Vital Soils Inoculation decomposition experiment Conventional and Organic Agriculture 2019

2\. Author Information

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A. Principal Investigator Contact Information

Name: Sophie Q. van Rijssel

Institution: Netherlands Institute of Ecology

Current adress: PO box PO Box 47, 6700 AA, Wageningen, The Netherlands. [e-mail]

B. Associate or Co-investigator Contact Information

Name: Eva Kuipers

contact: [e-mail]

C. Alternate Contact Information

Name: Ciska Veen

Institution: Netherlands Institute ...