Rajasekaran Murugan

University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna | boku · Institute of Soil Research

Cover crops (CC) offer numerous benefits to agroecosystems, particularly in the realm of soil organic carbon (SOC) accrual and loss mitigation. However, uncertainties persist regarding the extent to which CCs, in co-occurrence with environmental factors, influence SOC responses and associated C pools. We therefore performed a weighted meta-analysis...

Mid‐term (MTEs, 5 to 20 years) and long‐term (LTEs, 20+ years) field experiments are key sources of information to design future climate‐smart agriculture. Within the European Joint Program SOIL (EJP SOIL), we built the EJP SOIL‐MTE/LTE metadataset that contains metadata from 240 MTEs/LTEs across Europe. Metadata collected included precise descript...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays an important role in agricultural soils, as it contributes to overall soil health as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation. By conducting a meta-analysis, we aim to quantitatively summarize research studying the effects of cover crops (CC) on SOC pools throughout soil depths in arable cropland. We included...

Soil macrofauna plays a crucial role in ecosystem services and stability. They perform diverse set of ecosystem services that contribution to soil health, plant, and human wellbeing. However, little is known about the diversity, abundance, and distribution of soil macrofauna in Europe. Furthermore, the extent to which soil management practices impa...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a vital role in the global carbon cycle and is a potential sink for carbon dioxide. Agricultural management practices can support carbon sequestration and, therefore, offer potential removal strategies whilst also improving overall soil quality. Meta-analysis allows one to summarize results from primary articles by c...

Final reviewed protocol available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2023.102411

Soil fungi, as a major decomposer of organic matter, govern carbon (C) cycle and act as crucial regulators of the soil C and nutrient balance in terrestrial ecosystems. Climate change and parent material alter important environmental conditions that may affect fungal community. However, very little is known about the diversity and community structu...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a vital role in the global carbon cycle and is a potential sink for carbon dioxide. Agricultural management practices can support carbon sequestration and therefore offer potential removal strategies, whilst improving overall soil quality. Meta-analysis allows to summarize results from primary articles by calculating...

Earthworms are among the most important soil organisms in agricultural soils. They perform services as colonizers and engineers within the soil, and through their interactions with other soil biota, can contribute to soil health, nutrient cycling, changes in soil food web dynamics, organic matter decomposition, and disease control. However, little...

Predicted increase in climate warming will affect soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics in vulnerable cold alpine environments. In contrast to freeze and thaw cycles, less is known about the effects of temperature regimes in the range between 2 and 10 °C on SOC availability to soil microorganisms. For this reason, CO2 efflux, extracellular enzyme acti...

Microbial necromass is an important part of soil organic carbon (SOC), but the changes in its contribution along elevational gradients and soil types are poorly understood. At two sites, the alkaline site Hochschwab and the acidic site Rauris, soil samples from three elevation levels and depths were analysed for amino sugars as microbial necromass...

Tropical soils often contain less soil organic C (SOC) and microbial biomass C (MBC) than temperate soils and, thus, exhibit lower soil fertility. The addition of plant residues and N fertilizers can improve soil fertility, which might be reflected by microbial C use efficiency (CUE) and functional diversity. A 42-day incubation study was carried o...

Invasion of alien plant species can alter local plant diversity and ecosystem processes closely linked to soil organic carbon (SOC) and nutrient dynamics. Soil ecosystem processes such as microbial respiration and enzyme activity have been poorly explored under alien plant invasion and especially following invasive plant species removal. We studied...

Core Ideas Selection of spectral regions was included in MIR predictions of soil properties. The R software outperformed a commercial chemometric software. SVMR and model averaging performed better than PLSR and artificial neural networks. With decreasing calibration sample size, the usefulness of SVMR over PLSR decreased. MIRS studies may focus mo...

There is a lack of quantitative assessments available on the effect of agricultural intensification on soil aggregate distribution and microbial properties. Here, we investigated how short-term nitrogen (N) intensification induced changes in aggregate size distribution and microbial properties in a soil of a hot moist semi-arid region (Bangalore, I...

The distribution of microbial biomass and residues and their role in carbon (C) dynamics within soil aggregate fractions in the Alps are still poorly explored. We assessed the distribution of bacterial and fungal residues and their impact on the contribution of the microbial community to C dynamics within soil aggregate size fractions at different...

Changes in soil fungal biomass ergosterol, microbial biomass and their role in soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics along elevation and depth gradients in the Alps are still poorly explored. We investigated changes in stocks of SOC, total N, microbial biomass C (MBC) and N (MBN) and fungal biomass ergosterol at different elevation levels (low, mid an...

Visible and near infrared spectroscopy (vis‐NIRS) may be useful for an estimation of soil properties in arable fields, but the quality of results are often variable depending on the applied chemometric approach. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) may be replaced by approaches which employ supervised learning methods or variable selection proce...

The fate of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and their interactions with aggregates of forest soils are not completely understood. Our objectives here were to quantify the distribution of different POPs in water-stable aggregate fractions and to study their influence on soil organic carbon (Corg) content. Soil samples were taken from a forest-s...

We studied the influence of plant functional groups on soil microbial community composition and nutrient cycling in a tropical Eucalyptus forest ecosystem with different plantation age and soil types by means of stem girdling (SG) and understory removal (UR). Fungal and bacterial communities were characterized using phospholipid fatty acids, and ec...

The relationship between microbial biomass, residues and their contribution to microbial turnover is important to understand ecosystem C storage. The effects of permanent grassland (100 % ryegrass-PG), conversion to modified grassland (mixture of grass and clover-MG) or maize monoculture (MM) on the dynamics of soil organic C (SOC), microbial bioma...

The site-specific contribution of bacterial and especially fungal residues to a tillage-induced C sequestration is largely unknown, although microbial residues contribute a significant percentage to the soil organic C (SOC) pool. In the current study, the co-accumulation of microbial residues and organic matter was investigated in a mature, 15-year...

Amino sugars, as a microbial residue biomarker, are highly involved in microbial-mediated soil organic matter formation. However, accumulation of microbial biomass and responses of bacterial and fungal residues to the management practices are different and poorly characterized in rice soils. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the effects...

Agricultural intensification has a strong impact on level of soil organic matter (SOM), microbial biomass stocks and microbial community structure in agro-ecosystems. The size of the microbial necromass C pool could be about 40 times that of the living microbial biomass C pool in soils. Due to the specificity, amino sugar analysis gives more import...

The effects of cattle without and with biodynamic preparations on functional diversity of the soil microbial community were investigated in comparison with mineral fertilization (+ straw incorporation) at low and high application rates to a sandy soil of the long-term fertilization trial in Darmstadt, Germany. The multi-SIR method was used for inve...

Effects of goat manure application combined with charcoal and tannins, added as feed additives or mixed directly, on microbial biomass, microbial residues and soil organic matter were tested in a 2-year field trial on a sandy soil under Omani irrigated subtropical conditions. Soil microbial biomass C revealed the fastest response to manure applicat...

Leaf explants of Scoparia dulcis L. gave rise to multiple shoots when cultured on MS medium supplemented with different concentrations of TDZ and IAA. The highest rate of shoot multiplication was obtained in MS medium containing 4.0 µM TDZ and 1.0 µM IAA (26.6 ± 0.98). Differentiated shoot buds elongated to 5.8 cm in 21 days in 9 µM KIN amended med...

India is the leading country in area, production (25%) and growing wide variety of pulse crops but still the largest importer of pulses with 34% of the global food use. Decreasing soil nutrient status and emerging secondary nutrient deficiencies hampered the national average productivity and per capita availability of pulses over last two decades....