Responses of soil fungi to 5-year conservation tillage treatments in the drylands of northern China

•Conservation tillage influences soil fungal diversity.•Soil fungal diversity is affected by varying soil organic carbon and texture.•Ascomycota and Basidiomycota were dominant phyla as decomposers across all samples.•Zero tillage, a less disruptive practice, can preserve soil biological integrity.•Conservation tillage might alter residue decomposition to affect soil fungi.

Soil fungi have many important ecological functions such as decomposition of soil organic matter and facilitation of nutrient turnover and availability in agricultural soils, which can be influenced by tillage treatments. Conservation tillage is widely used in the dryland regions of northern China. However, insights into the effect of conservation tillage on soil fungal community compositions and structures are considerably limited. This study aimed to investigate the effect of 5-year conservation tillage treatments, including chisel plow tillage (CPT), zero tillage (ZT), and plow tillage (PT) as convention tillage treatment, on soil fungal communities by using high-throughput sequencing technology and quantitative polymerase chain reaction. Conservation tillage significantly influenced soil fungal diversity and phylogenetic composition by altering soil organic carbon content and texture. The fungal diversity and composition structure were similar for treatments causing higher soil perturbation, i.e., CPT and PT; ZT, a less disruptive agriculture practice, preserved soil biological integrity. The most abundant phyla across all samples were Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, which are considered to be the main classical fungal decomposers in soils. These results suggested that conservation tillage can affect crop residue decomposition and the soil organic carbon content, leading to changes in soil fungal community distribution patterns. Our findings might form the basis for the application of conservation tillage to produce more stable and sustainable soil ecosystems in the drylands of northern China.