Impact of cultivation practices on soil respiration

In addition to its, evident, food supply function, agriculture is subjected to various pressures and has to respond to many challenges like reducing its CO2 emissions, maintaining or improving the soil quality, maintaining productivity, sequestrating of the carbon stock in soil... Cultivation practices are known to induce a modification of soil organic matter quantity, quality and spatial distribution, which may impact dry matter decomposition kinetics. In order to bring answers to these questions, a multidisciplinary project (SOLRESIDUS) was set up by the University of Liege, Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech in collaboration with Walloon Agricultural Research Centre (CRA-W). The aim was to investigate the impact of cultivation practices (tillage and residue restitution) on crop growth, yield and environment, as well as on soil properties and on activities. In the present study, we focused on the impacts on soil CO2 fluxes. The experimental site is situated in Gembloux, in the Belgian loamy region. The plot is divided into 4 latin squares where two tillage modalities (plough after 2 stubble breaking vs only 2 stubble breaking) and two straw management practices (restitution vs. exportation) were compared. For 3 years, soil respiration was measured with automatic and manual dynamic soil chambers. Moreover, soil respiration was measured as well in cropping zone (total respiration) as in root exclusion zones created with root exclusion cylinders (heterotrophic respiration). As first results, we observed:
-a significantly higher flux in plots with residue restitution, which is clearly explained by the larger amount of organic carbon prone to decomposition;
-a decrease of standardized heterotrophic respiration (linked with residue decomposition) during growing seasons;
-no significant differences in soil respiration between tillage modalities after 3 growing seasons.
The experiment is still in progress, more years being necessary in order to evaluate the long-term impacts of cultivation practices on soil respiration.