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Archive for the ‘Plants’ Category

Cover Crops Support Microbial Diversity: Three Case Studies

Posted in Climate, Food, Plants on 08/03/2023|

Imagine if your neighborhood is routinely destroyed. The houses, streets, and businesses damaged. It would be difficult to have a community thrive under such devastating circumstances. Soil microbes experience a similar scenario when traditional agricultural practices are used on the farm.

The soil microbiome is a collection of bacteria, fungi, and archaea that play an integral role in soil and plant health. These microbes provide vital ecosystem services like breaking down organic matter and cycling nturients to make them available to plants. The microbes also control and suppress pathogens, both fungi and bacteria. 

“[These organisms] promote decomposition of materials, like roots and other plant materials, into carbon dioxide and soil organic matter,” said Christoph C. Tebbe, professor at the Thünen Institute, Germany. “[They] are an important for creating the building blocks for keeping soil in a very healthy structure, not compacted but nice aggregates and a pore system that allows plants to grow better.”

In addition, the soil microbiome consumes and stores excess nutrients from fertilizer applications and purifies water, preventing nutrient run-off and eutrophication further downstream. It also degrades pesticides into nontoxic compounds so the chemicals are more easily processed through the environment. 

“Industrial agriculture requires large fertilizer applications on large fields to grow monoculture crops, which can be productive for years, even decades, but soil structure gets worse and plant inputs may need to be increased,” said Tebbe. “In the end though, farmers want to give their fields and farms to the next generation in a state as good as they received it.”

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Exploring a Future with Perennial Rye

Posted in Food, Plants on 08/10/2022|

Monoculture dominates modern agriculture, but many agronomists are looking to the past to explore the environmental and economic benefits of perennial crops with the aim of creating more sustainable farming systems.

For thousands of years, farmers have reaped the benefits of perennial crops, from fruit trees to alfalfa to grapes. Today, farmers and researchers are looking for other perennial crops that require less water and nutrient input than annuals and provide a reliable and economically sustainable food source for their farming enterprises. Perennials do not require reseeding every year, which is an enticing prospect in the face of changing climate, rising energy costs, and land degradation. These plants also allow farmers to disengage from the economic instability of annual planting that require costly inputs and operational expenses.

Recent studies have begun to explore the potential of perennial grains to support new agricultural systems that can meet global caloric requirements on the current footprint of cultivated agricultural land.

The Pros and Cons of Perennial Crops

Most grain crops require annual replanting. To give the new growth a leg up in the competitive world, pesticides and fertilizers kickstart the new growth. This annual production process emits significant greenhouse gases, contributing to climate change that can in turn have adverse effects on agricultural productivity. 

Perennial grains offer an opportunity to get off the annual planting cycle and provide additional benefits to the land for future cultivation. These crops have greater access to resources over a longer growing season and maintain the health and fertility of soil. Because perennials do not need to be reseeded every year, annual plowing and soil disruption is limited, which reduces erosion and the loss of topsoil from wind and rainfall. The more stable soil structure also holds onto moisture more efficiently and filters pollutants, like nitrogen from synthetic fertilizers, from traveling to groundwater systems. Because the soil can hold onto the nutrients, fertilizer application is lower. Perennials also invest more carbon reserves below ground to establish their deeper, denser root systems. The extensive root systems also allow these plants to grow on marginal lands. Perennials can also compete against weeds and do not require annual herbicide application.

But perennials are a conundrum.

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Oak Trees Offer a Continuous Climate Record for Central Europe

Posted in Climate, Plants on 04/02/2021|

A method using nonpooled, continuous stable carbon and oxygen isotopes recorded in oak trees benefits climate reconstructions.

Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

For decades, the widths of tree rings have offered a precise window into past regional environmental conditions. The oxygen (δ18O) and carbon (δ13C) isotopic signatures of wood cellulose provide an additional, nuanced environmental fingerprint that records subtle shifts in temperature, precipitation, and drought conditions.

Despite the power of this approach, questions remain as to how tree species, site elevation, tree age, and preservation techniques could affect the stable isotopic values captured in the individual samples.

“To reconstruct multimillennial chronologies, samples from living trees, historical timbers, archaeological remains, and subfossil materials have to be combined,” said Otmar Urban, a scientist at the Global Change Research Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, and first author of a new study on the value of stable isotopes in individual trees. “It could bring problems, because [this information] is usually unknown.”

To address these uncertainties, the researchers developed a new method to evaluate the variability in the stable isotopic record in individual trees. They leveraged a multimillennial tree ring chronology established in the Czech Republic, consisting of about 4,000 core samples obtained from living oaks and historical timbers of the same species. This database provides a mechanism to reconstruct climate conditions across central Europe over the past 1,500 years. The results of the study were published in the February issue of Dendrochronologia.

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Global Warming Could Rob Liquors of Their Flavor

Posted in Climate, Food, Geology, Plants on 03/05/2021|

Ranunculus glacialis at the toe of the Pasquale glacier. Credit: Marco Caccianiga

A new study examines the impact of glacial extinction on biodiversity in alpine regions.

Many of the botanicals used in traditional medicines and to flavor spirits, from absinthe to eau de vie, grow in alpine regions near the toes of glacial ice. As the planet warms and glacial ice retreats, this unique environment is changing and altering the diversity of the plant community.

An Italian team of researchers explored the physical and biological factors that cascade through an ecosystem as glaciers retreat. The results, published in the January issue of Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, are not promising for your favorite flavored liquors.

“Glacial retreat is a double-edged sword,” said Gianalberto Losapio, a postdoctoral research fellow in ecology at Stanford University and first author on the study. “Habitat opens as a direct consequence of losing the glacier, but diversity decreases as competition increases from the species that persist.”

The researchers examined published data sets on plant species distribution and leaf traits along with unpublished, original data on environmental conditions at four locations—Vedretta d’Amola glacier, Western Trobio glacier, Rutor glacier, and the Vedretta di Cedec glacier forelands—within the Italian Alps.

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