ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Terrestrial Microbiology
This article is part of the Research TopicHarnessing Plant-Soil-Microbe Interactions for Sustainable AgricultureView all 4 articles
Three-year continuous maize cropping improves saline-alkali soil microenvironment and crop productivity
Provisionally accepted
- 1Daqing Normal University, Daqing, China
- 2Dalian University, Dalian, China
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Introduction: The efficient utilization of soda saline-alkali land is of great strategic significance for ensuring China's food security and improving the ecological environment. Cultivating salt-alkali tolerant plants can ameliorate the properties of saline-alkali soil, with rhizosphere microorsganisms playing a crucial role in this process. Methods: We conducted a 3-year field experiment in Lamadian, Daqing, China, using high-throughput sequencing to analyze the maize rhizosphere microbial community diversity and its relationships with soil properties, enzyme activities, and plant yield. Results: The results showed that pH and total salt (TS) content decreased annually, while the contents of available potassium (AK), available nitrogen (AN), and available phosphorus (AP) and soil polyphenol oxidase (S-PPO), soil urease (S-UE), soil catalase (S-CAT), soil alkaline phosphatase (S-AKP), soil deoxyribonuclease, and soil sucrase (S-SC) enzyme activities increased yearly. The maize yield increased by 8.38% and 2.42% annually. Actinobacteriota, Proteobacteria, Acidobacteriota, and Chloroflexi were the dominant bacterial phyla in the maize rhizosphere soil. Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, and Mortierellomycota were the dominant fungal phyla. Correlation analysis indicated that Blastococcus, Bacillus, and Nocardioides were the key bacteria influencing AK, TS, S-UE, and S-PPO activity. In the fungal community, Tausonia, Mortierella, and Gibellulopsis were the key factors affecting AP, AK, and TS content, as well as S-SC, S-UE, and S-PPO activities. Conclusion: Three years of maize cultivation effectively improved the physicochemical properties and enzyme activities of saline-alkali soil and drove the restructuring of the rhizosphere microbial community. Notably, the fungal community structure tended to stabilize after 1 year, whereas bacterial diversity increased annually, revealing their distinct roles in ecological restoration. These results provide a theoretical basis and practical guidance for leveraging crop–microbe interactions to ameliorate saline-alkali land.
Keywords: crop continuously, Maize, Microbial Diversity, Soda saline-alkali land, soil improvement
Received: 24 Oct 2025; Accepted: 29 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ling, Wang, Wang, Chen, Xu, Wang and Ren. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Guoling Ren
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