Effects of soil management on microbial respiration in nine German vineyards in summer 2016

Soil microbial respiration was measured in nine experimental vineyards in the Rhein-Hesse area, Germany, in June 2016. Each vineyard exhibited 4 experimental plots with different soil management types (complete cover, herbal seed mixture cover, alternating tillage, and complete tillage).
In each vineyard, eight soil samples of the upper soil layer (0-10 cm) were taken, two neighboring inter-rows per plot. Microbial soil respiration rates were obtained from a 4.5 g fresh soil sample from each inter-row moisturized to water saturation and measured with a customized micro-respirometer (Scheu 1992) for about 22 hours and reported as the average oxygen consumption per gram dry soil between measurement hours 10 - 20 h. The measurements were done at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland).