Thesis supervisor: János Balogh
co-supervisor: Katalin Posta
Location of studies (in Hungarian): MATE Gödöllő Abbreviation of location of studies: MATE
Description of the research topic:
According to recent studies, croplands were the only agricultural land use systems assumed to lose carbon in the last decades. It seems that the yearly C input does not reach the critical level to maintain soil organic carbon content in these systems. Therefore, there is a need in agriculture to develop management techniques to maintain/increase the soil organic carbon pool. Application of microbial products is an increasingly common technique in agricultural soil management. These products help plants in nutrient mobilization, water uptake or enhance their stress resistance. Among them, root-associated organisms e.g. arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are directly connected to the roots and their functioning depend on plant carbon allocation. Mycorrhizal fungi, which live in association with plant roots and derive their carbon directly from the plant, can regulate the carbon sequestration capacity in the soil. Moreover, mycorrhizal association plays a large role in soil carbon stabilization as well. The planned research aims to study how carbon cycling in cropland soils changes due to mycorrhizal fungi addition. Both ecological (carbon fluxes, plant traits) and microbiological (hyphal density of AM, change in microbiome) approaches will be used to reveal the changes in soil carbon cycling. The main question is that how feasible is it to manage plant allocation patterns to sequester SOM but maintain growth and yield considering the trade-offs of these processes?
Required language skills: English Number of students who can be accepted: 1
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