Abstract
Soil microbial communities play a key role in carbon (C) cycling in agroecosystems; however, their long-term responses to contrasting management practices remain poorly understood in agricultural soils. In this study, we evaluated the effects of more than 20 years of no-till farming (NTF) and conventional tillage (CT) on soil physicochemical properties, bacterial and fungal community composition, and inferred functions related to C and nutrient cycling in the Argentine Pampas. We show that NTF increased total organic carbon (TOC) stocks in surface soils and promoted edaphic conditions associated with C stabilization, including higher cation exchange capacity and structural stability. Bacterial communities exhibited high functional redundancy and were primarily structured along sodium-related parameters, whereas fungal communities were more sensitive to management, with NTF favoring ligninolytic and symbiotic fungi that contribute to necromass formation and long-term carbon stabilization. In contrast, CT enriched opportunistic fungal guilds associated with disturbance and short-term nutrient turnover. Phylogenetic analyses revealed community assembly dominated by environmental filtering in both microbial domains. Overall, these results highlight the central role of fungi as mediators of soil C stabilization and suggest that conservation practices such as NTF enhance microbiome contributions to ecosystem services and climate change mitigation in intensively managed agroecosystems.
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Data availability
The raw 16 S and 18 S rRNA gene sequence data and their associated metadata are publicly available in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) under accession number PRJEB97327.Additional environmental metadata and R scripts used for data processing and analysis are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This study was partially supported, by the project PICTs 2018-3723 and 2020-2023 from Agencia de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica (Argentina), by PIP CONICET11220210100584CO 2022-2024; by CNR (Italy) - CONICET (Argentina) 2021-2023 Bilateral Agreement; by Margin Up project 2023-2026 European Union’s Horizon research. Views and opinion expressed are however those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authorities can be held responsible for them.
Funding
This study was partially supported by PICTs 2018–3723 and 2020–2023 from Agencia de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica (Argentina), by PIP CONICET 11220210100584CO 2022–2024, by CNR (Italy) – CONICET (Argentina) 2021–2023 Bilateral Agreement, and by the Margin Up project 2023–2026 (European Union’s Horizon research). Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authorities can be held responsible for them.
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Maximiliano Gortari: Data curation, formal analysis, research, writing – original draft. Vanina Giselle Maguire: Investigation, formal analysis, resources, writing – review & editing. Juan Pedro Ezquiaga: Investigation. Mariano Cicchino: Resources. Matías Bailleres: Resources, methodology, Supervision. Roberto Ulises Escaray: investigation. Oscar Adolfo Ruiz: Conceptualization, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Writing – review & editing, Project administration. María Eugenia Llames: Conceptualization, Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Resources, Supervision.
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Gortari, M., Maguire, V.G., Ezquiaga, J.P. et al. Associations between soil microbiomes and carbon stabilization under long-term no-till farming systems in the Argentine Pampas. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-47621-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-47621-4
