Plant-soil-microbial nitrogen cycling across contrasting organic farms in an intensively-managed agricultural landscape

How farming systems supply sufficient nitrogen (N) for high yields but with reduced N losses is a central challenge for reducing the tradeoffs often associated with N cycling in agriculture. This dissertation consists of three studies that assess how variability in organic farms across an agricultural landscape may yield insights for improving N cycling and for evaluating novel indicators of N availability.;Pulses of N are common in agricultural systems and often result in N losses if N is not quickly captured by plants or soil microbes. But understanding of how root behavioral responses and microbial N dynamics interact following soil N pulses remains limited, especially in soil under field conditions relevant to actual agroecosystem processes. The first study examined rhizosphere responses to a soil N pulse in an organic farm soil. A novel combination of molecular and 15N isotopic techniques was used to investigate the response of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) roots and soil N cycling to a pulse of inorganic N in an undisturbed soil patch on an organic farm. Tomato roots rapidly responded to and exploited the N pulse via upregulation of key N metabolism genes that comprise the core physiological response of roots to patchy soil N availability. The transient root gene expression response underscored the sensitivity of root N uptake to local N availability. Strong root activity limited accumulation of soil nitrate (NO3 -) despite high rates of gross nitrification and allowed roots to out-compete soil microbes for uptake of the inorganic N pulse, even on the short time scale of a few days. Root expression of genes such as cytosolic glutamine synthetase, a key gene in root N assimilation, could serve as a "plant's eye view" of N availability when plant-soil N cycling is rapid, complementing more typical measures of N availability like soil inorganic N pools and bioassays of N mineralization potential.;Much of the research geared toward improving N cycling takes place at research stations with fixed management factors and limited variation in soil characteristics. Better understanding of how the plant-soil-microbe interactions that underpin N availability, potential for N loss, and yields vary across working farms would help reveal how to simultaneously achieve high provisioning (yields) and regulating (low potential for N loss) ecosystem services in heterogeneous landscapes. A landscape approach was thus used in the second and third studies to assess crop yields, plant-soil N cycling, root gene expression, and soil microbial community activity and composition over the course of a tomato growing season on working organic farms in Yolo County, California, USA. The 13 selected fields were representative of organic tomato production in the local landscape and spanned a three-fold range of soil carbon (C) and N but had similar soil types, texture, and pH. Yields ranged from 22.9 to 120.1 Mg ha-1 with a mean similar to the county average (86.1 Mg ha-1), which included mostly conventionally-grown tomatoes. Substantial variability in soil inorganic N concentrations, tomato N, and root gene expression indicated a range of possible tradeoffs between yields and potential for N losses across the fields. Soil enzyme activities reflected distinct metabolic capacity in each field, such that soil C-cycling enzyme potential activities increased with inorganic N availability while those of soil N-cycling enzymes increased with soil C availability. Compared to potential enzyme activity, there was less variation in soil microbial community composition, likely reflecting the history of high soil disturbance and low ecological complexity in this landscape. The variation in potential activity of soil enzymes across the organic fields thus may be due to high plasticity of the resident microbial community to environmental conditions.;Those fields in the landscape that showed evidence of tightly-coupled plant-soil N cycling, a desirable scenario in which high crop yields are supported by adequate N availability but low potential for N loss, had the highest total and labile soil C and N and received diverse types of organic matter inputs with a range of N availability. In these fields, elevated expression of cytosolic glutamine synthetase in roots (as evaluated in the first study), confirmed that plant N assimilation was high even when soil inorganic N pools were low. The on-farm approach provided a wide range of farming practices and soil characteristics to reveal how microbially-derived ecosystem functions can be effectively manipulated to enhance nutrient cycling capacity. Novel combinations of N cycling indicators (i.e. inorganic N along with soil microbial activity and root gene expression for N assimilation) would support adaptive management for improved N cycling on organic as well as conventional farms, and could overcome the uncertainty of managing N inputs accurately, especially when plant-soil N cycling is rapid.