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Comprehensive Assessment of the Multi-cropping Effect on the Agroecosystems
Version 1
: Received: 28 March 2024 / Approved: 29 March 2024 / Online: 29 March 2024 (06:44:57 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Balandaitė, J.; Romaneckas, K.; Kimbirauskienė, R.; Sinkevičienė, A. Comprehensive Assessment of the Effect of Multi-Cropping on Agroecosystems. Plants 2024, 13, 1372. Balandaitė, J.; Romaneckas, K.; Kimbirauskienė, R.; Sinkevičienė, A. Comprehensive Assessment of the Effect of Multi-Cropping on Agroecosystems. Plants 2024, 13, 1372.
Abstract
Multi-cropping is becoming an increasingly popular approach in agriculture to tackle major and complex agroecosystem problems such as biodiversity and soil fertility losses, erosion and degradation, increased greenhouse gas emissions, etc. Comprehensive assessment of the impact of multi-cropping intensity on the agroecosystem is a new and still under-researched approach that provides a better understanding of the impact of the individual indicators studied on the overall functioning of the biodiversed agroecosystems. Data from a stationary field experiment with multi-cropping at the Vytautas Magnus University, Experimental Station between 2020 and 2022 were used to achieve this objective. The study included maize, hemp and faba bean as single, binary, and ternary crops. A complex assessment approach (CEI value) was used to determine the impact of these diversified crops on the agroecosystem, the interrelationships between the main indicators and the strength of their effects. It was found that the most positive effect on agroecosystem had ternary maize-hemp-faba bean crop. The effectiveness of other crops was from 2 to 35% less. The lowest one was calculated for the maize-faba bean crop.
Keywords
maize; hemp; faba bean; multifunctional crop; complex analysis; CEI
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Agricultural Science and Agronomy
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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