Submission Date

7-25-2025

Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Department

Biology

Faculty Mentor

Denise Finney

Student Contributor

Isabelle Barrett

Comments

Presented during the 27th Annual Summer Fellows Symposium, July 18, 2025 at Ursinus College.

Project Description

Cover cropping is a conservation agriculture practice that uses non-cash crops, grown between cash cropping seasons, with the objective of balancing and enriching the soil. To explore whether cover cropping has an effect on decomposition, we measured the quantification of carbon dioxide over a set period of time. Soil samples were collected during the stages of V5/V6 among corn fields across southeastern Pennsylvania in the summer of 2025. Fields represent a legacy of cover cropping (CC) ranging from 0 – 15+ years. We analyzed these soils through a decomposition incubation assay to determine the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) that these soils produce. Soil samples from the depth of 0 – 15 cm were used to concentrate on the most recent addition of organic matter provided by the cover crops. As of writing this paper, only 4 of the 33 fields have gone through the decomposition assay, restricting any statistical analysis to be conducted. We saw a trend indicating that a five-day incubation period is sufficient to capture the peak microbial utilization of available carbon. We also observed a trend that the soils exposed to CC for a longer exposure period had a higher concentration of CO2. We stand by our hypothesis that cover crops contributes to a faster decomposition rate in agriculture soil. We plan on running all samples collected during the summer to determine if the trend does back a significance in the data.

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