Congratulations to Marta, Alison, Anne Elise, and Kent for three new papers on the ecosystem benefits of cover crops.

These explore:

1) how unique management legacies, and resulting soil fertility properties, influence the functions provided by a cover crop mixture within the Main Cropping Systems Experiment at Kellogg Biological Station (Plumhoff, M., Connell, R.K., Bressler, A., and J. Blesh. 2022. Management history and mixture evenness affect the ecosystem services from a crimson clover-rye cover crop. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2022.108155.)

2) whether increasing cover crop functional diversity with a legume-grass mixture can reduce pulse emissions of N₂O in the weeks following tillage in two field sites with contrasting soil fertility properties (Bressler, A. and J. Blesh. 2022. Episodic N₂O emissions following tillage of a legume-grass cover crop mixture. Biogeosciences 19, 3169–3184. https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-19-3169-2022.)

3) the effects of two diversification practices—vetch-oat cover cropping and cucumber-snow pea intercropping—on N cycling and productivity across a farm management gradient. The field experiment spanned 14 farms in southern Brazil with different long-term management histories, ranging from conventional tobacco to agroecological mixed crop-livestock systems. (Stratton, A.E., Comin, J.J., Siddique, I., Zak, D.R., Filipini, L., Lucas, R.R., and J. Blesh. 2022. Assessing cover crop and intercrop performance along a farm management gradient. Agriculture Ecosystems and Environment 332: 107925. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2022.107925.)