In recent years agricultural practices aimed at increasing soil fertility and carbon sequestration, and decreasing greenhouse gases emissions have been recommended, together with the reduction of mineral fertilizers and pesticides (IPCC 2018).
More...In recent years agricultural practices aimed at increasing soil fertility and carbon sequestration, and decreasing greenhouse gases emissions have been recommended, together with the reduction of mineral fertilizers and pesticides (IPCC 2018). Among the different practices, the use of organic matter soil amendments, such as agricultural by-products or wastes, has been implemented.The aim of this work was to investigate the impact of two types of sheep wool residues (SWR) (scoured residues, white wool, and carbonized scoured residues, black wool), used at 4 different SWR/soil ratios (0, 0.5, 1.0, 2.0%) as soil amendments, in pot-grown olive trees on soil bacterial communities and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF).We showed that the use of sheep wool residues as organic soil fertilizers in olive trees affects the diversity and composition of soil bacterial communities, as assessed by a culture-independent method, PCR-DGGE. Moreover, our findings detected the type and concentration of SWR to be avoided in order to maintain high bacterial diversity and native AMF ability to colonize olive roots.
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