Ecosystem Service Provisioning By Cover Crop Mixtures and Monocultures in an Organic Feed and Forage Cropping System.

Cover crops can provide different ecosystem services as a result of specific plant functional traits.  Combining different cover crop species with complementary functional traits could be one strategy to increase the provisioning of a diverse array of ecosystem services.  We will report the ecosystem services provided by different cover crop mixtures assembled from a candidate pool of 6 species (cereal rye, oats, forage radish, canola, red clover and Austrian winter pea) in comparison to each species grown in monoculture and a no cover crop control.  Cover crop treatments were planted between winter wheat and silage corn in three successive years of a full-entry organic cropping system experiment in Pennsylvania.  Ecosystem services measured in the experiment included cover crop biomass accrual, nitrogen retention, nitrogen supply, crop yields, weed suppression, and support for beneficial insect and native pollinator communities.