Fresh and degraded maize shoot and root residues temporarily change soil hydraulic properties

Titelangaben

Leuther, Frederic ; Langanki, Alina ; Lehndorff, Eva ; Diamantopoulos, Efstathios:
Fresh and degraded maize shoot and root residues temporarily change soil hydraulic properties.
In: EGUsphere. Bd. 2026 (2026) . - S. 1-21.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-1063

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Abstract

Mulching and incorporation of crop residues (CR) into soils are common strategies to sustain soil carbon stocks, return nutrients, and regulate water losses through bare soil evaporation. To date, implementing the effect of mulching strategies into soil-plant-atmosphere models remains challenging due to limited information on their influence on soil hydraulic properties (SHP) as well as on the persistence of these effects over time. We hypothesized that increasing amounts of incorporated maize CR benefits water retention and reduces unsaturated hydraulic conductivity, and that the quality of the CR would determine the persistence of the effects, i.e., that mulching with relatively fast decaying shoot residues would be less persistent than incorporating root residues.