In-depth insight into the short-term effect of floor management practice on young apple trees development and soil microbial biodiversity and activity

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0329979 August 7, 2025 1 / 15 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Furmanczyk EM, Malusà E (2025) In- depth insight into the short-term effect of floor management practice on young apple trees development and soil microbial biodiversity and activity. PLoS One 20(8): e0329979. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0329979 Editor: Ahmet Uludag, Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, TÜRKIYE Received: March 14, 2025 Accepted: July 23, 2025 Published: August 7, 2025 Copyright: © 2025 Furmanczyk, Malusà . This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data availability statement: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting information files. Funding: The work was carried out in the framework of the project BioHortiTech, financially supported by the NCBR grant n. RESEARCH ARTICLE In-depth insight into the short-term effect of floor management practice on young apple trees development and soil microbial biodiversity and activity Ewa M. Furmanczyk *, Eligio Malusà Department of Plant Protection, The National Institute of Horticultural Research, Skierniewice, Poland * ewa.furmanczyk@inhort.pl Abstract Living mulches can be considered a practice providing multi-level benefits and sev- eral ecosystem services in orchards. Two multifunctional living mulches (Mix1 – Trifo-

lium repens (20%) and Festuca ovina (80%), Mix2 – a mixture of 10 different species suitable as flowering strip) sown during the establishment of an apple orchard, were evaluated in relation to the impact on the soil nutrient content and bacterial microbi- ome, as well as the growth and yield potential of the apple trees. Notwithstanding the increase of N-nitrate and N-ammonia forms induced in the soil, both living mulches mixtures limited the growth and yield potential of the apple trees during the first two growing seasons. The two mixtures induced divergent effects on the biodiversity, activity and metabolic potential of the soil bacterial microbiome, not always increasing them compared to natural cover (control). Such effects could be related to modifica- tions that both mixtures induced in the bacterial community capacity of metabolizing some classes of C-sources compared to control. This was particularly evident for Mix2 and in summer, when all classes of C-sources utilised by the bacterial commu- nity for its metabolism resulted to be significantly more exploited than in other sea- sons. In conclusion, the impact of very diverse living mulch mixtures on the growth, yield potential and overall nutrient status of the young apple trees could be related to modification of the tree physiological status, indirectly derived from the modifica- tions observed on the soil bacterial communities’ composition and metabolic capacity during the whole vegetative season. These results could provide hints for the correct

soil management of the orchard to foster the exploitation of soil microbiome suitable for the apple trees development and production.