2026-10-09T00:55:16Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33970156 2026-09-23T04:00:29Z category_26983 category_23881 category_26986 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

<b>Long-term manuring decouples the soil nutrient cycles that it is intended to balance</b> Qingxu Ma (25093660) Sheng Tang (21088567) Wankun Pan (22911116) Andy Macdonald (9770012) Yakov Kuzyakov (15341553) Wolfgang Wanek (10998206) Dave Chadwick (19191642) Yongchao Liang (20494300) Lianghuan Wu (20494302) Davey L. Jones (20494308) Soil biology Sustainable agricultural development Soil chemistry and soil carbon sequestration (excl. carbon sequestration science) manure applications nutrient cycling microbial community composition element cycling rates soil metagenomics <p dir="ltr">Carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur are co-located in soil organic matter and metabolised together by microorganisms, and their cycles are generally assumed to remain coupled under fertilisation. Organic amendments are widely promoted for soil fertility, yet whether repeated manure application keeps these cycles coupled—or decouples element pools, turnover rates and the mediating microbial genes—has never been jointly tested. Here, using a 54-year field experiment that combined ¹⁴C, ¹⁵N, ³³P and ³⁵S isotope tracing with soil metagenomics, we show that farmyard manure decouples the cycling of carbon and nitrogen from that of phosphorus and sulphur. Manure increased soil carbon and nitrogen stocks, turnover rates and related enzyme activities, but depleted topsoil organic phosphorus and sulphur through enhanced mineralisation and lower or similar phosphorus and sulphur inputs, even though plant-available phosphorus and sulphur remained similar. Strikingly, the abundances of carbon-, nitrogen-, phosphorus- and sulphur-cycling genes were largely unrelated to element stocks and process rates, challenging the assumption that gene abundance predicts ecosystem function. Our results reveal an underappreciated risk of manure-only fertilisation—the progressive depletion of soil and crop phosphorus and sulphur—and show that combining mineral with organic fertilisers maintains balanced nutrient cycling.</p> 2026-09-23T04:00:29Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.33970156.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/_b_Long-term_manuring_decouples_the_soil_nutrient_cycles_that_it_is_intended_to_balance_b_/33970156 CC BY 4.0