Abstract
Competition or complementarity between associated plants due to belowground interactions has been observed in alley-cropping systems (ACs), but the initialization of these processes remains poorly investigated. Here, we used the core-break and soil coring method to quantify the vertical tree and wheat fine root abundance and biomass down to 120 cm in a 4-year-old temperate AC. Fine roots were measured at 2 m from a reference tree (hornbeam, wild cherry or willow) in tree–wheat AC, pure-forest associated with ryegrass (FC) and wheat sole-crop (CC) plots at the Ramecourt experimental site. The mean wheat fine root abundance (WFRA) was twice as high in the CC plot (874 ± 152 m−2) as in the AC plot (437 ± 47 m−2). It was significantly higher for wheat associated with hornbeam than for willow, particularly at the 10 cm depth. Tree fine root abundance (TFRA) was linearly correlated with tree fine root biomass (TFRB) for hornbeam (R2 = 0.79***), willow (R2 = 0.77***) and wild cherry (R2 = 0.54***). Using TFRA, the van Noordwijk's equation gave a better prediction of the TFRB for willow and wild cherry than for hornbeam. The mean value of the TFRA was seven times higher in the FC plot (1116 ± 97 m−2) than in the AC plot (146 ± 24 m−2) for all soil depths and all tree species due to the lack of nutrients from the absence of fertilization. At 4 years old, willow and hornbeam fine roots cohabited with wheat in the upper soil layer, whereas wild cherry had already developed deep fine roots under the crop rooting zone.
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Acknowledgements
This study was financed by “La Fondation de France”, the French water agency “l′Agence de l′eau Artois—Picardie”, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency or ADEME and the Hauts-de-France Region. We thank Antoine Dequidt for providing us this experimental plot for this investigation and Fabien Monte for all the agricultural work. We also thank the students of “Institut d’Hazebrouck” for the tree growth measurement. We are grateful to Pierre Saillard and Marianne Boilland for their valuable help during soil sampling in the field and for the very time-consuming root counting and sorting work in the laboratory.
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CO and KSA designed the study, performed field experiments and collected the data. CO performed the analysis and prepared the first draft of the manuscript. CO and KSA wrote the main manuscript. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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O’Connor, C., Choma, C., Delbende, F. et al. Tree–wheat vertical fine root distribution in a 4-year-old temperate alley-cropping system. Agroforest Syst 98, 751–766 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-023-00945-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-023-00945-w