Effects of conservation agriculture technologies on soil macrofauna community attributes in rainfed agriculture system

Inappropriate rainfed crop management, especially wrong tillage and crop residue management, led to reduce the diversity of soil biological quality, especially soil macrofauna community, in semiarid region. This study was conducted to investigate the effect of 5 year conservation agriculture operation techniques on the quality and the diversity indices of soil macrofauna community in the rainfed lands in the west of Iran. This experiment was carried out in the statistical format of split-split plots based on a randomized completely block design with three replications. The main treatments include control or conventional tillage, compound tillage, chisel tillage, and direct cultivation (no tillage) with three sub-treatments of plant residues (no residues, one-third, and two-thirds of plant residues) in rainfed wheat (Triticum aestivum) rotation with rainfed chickpea (Cicer arietinum). Changes in soil biological quality indicators, such as soil microbial respiration were measured. Also, the indicators related to the population of soil macrofauna, including biodiversity index, uniformity index, and species richness, were measured and the effect of treatments on the measured indicators were compared with the classical statistical method of analysis of variance and Duncan's mean comparison test. The results showed that conservation agricultural treatments, including no-tillage treatment, have led to significant increase of 19% and 15% of macrofauna biodiversity index in wheat and chickpea, respectively. Also, keeping one-third of the wheat residues has led to an 18% increase in the biodiversity index of the soil macrofauna during the evaluation period. Biodiversity index and taxonomic richness of soil macrofauna were generally higher in the years of wheat than chickpea, and on the contrary, the species uniformity index of soil macrofauna biological community was higher in chickpea than wheat.