Earthworm abundance and diversity in response to intensive crop management in organic field crop farms of southern Quebec, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Earthworms are identified as soil engineers as they play a key role in soil health, influencing soil structure and short-term soil organic carbon dynamics. Their abundance and diversity are subject to the variability of agricultural practices in cropping systems and are less examined under organic management. We aimed to assess the effect of relatively intensive cropping systems, specifically short rotations– three years of grain cropping (corn ( Zea mays L.) -soybean ( Glycine max [L.] Merr.) -small grain) – under organic management on earthworm abundance and diversity. A field survey was conducted on 11 certified organic grain farms in the spring of 2019 and on 10 of the same certified organic farms in the spring of 2021 in Quebec, Canada. At each farm, earthworms were sampled by physical and chemical extractions in three different fields: a corn, a soybean, and a small grain field. A field margin was also sampled at each farm in 2021 as a reference site. The effect of in-season tillage, manure application and time since organic certification, and use of perennial forages, on earthworm community variables were also evaluated. In this study, the average earthworm abundance was 130 ± 20.3 ind. m −2 in 2019 and 135 ± 21.8 ind. m −2 in 2021; whereas biomass was 13.0 ± 2.1 g m −2 in 2019 and 4.2 ± 0.8 g m −2 in 2021. Endogeic species were the most abundant, with Aporrectodea turgida observed in 83 % of fields. Earthworm diversity, richness, and abundance did not differ between cropped fields and field margins, but earthworm dry biomass was 1.8 times higher in the cropped fields than in the field margins. The crop phase did not influence any earthworm community variable. Total earthworm abundance was 1.5 times higher in fields that were managed organically for >20 years than in those that were managed organically for a shorter period. Overall, farming practices such as in-season tillage and the time since the last perennial forage crop have shaped earthworm communities promoting endogeic species over epigeic and anecic species. • Earthworm communities were investigated in 63 organic grain crop fields. • 11 species were present in cropped fields and 3 were unique to field margins. • The crop in place did not influence earthworm abundance, biomass, diversity, or richness. • Fields with a longer history of organic management had the highest earthworm abundance. • Earthworm abundance and biomass increased with inversion tillage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".