Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 482

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 66 of the 66 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Biodegradable Plastic Mulch Films: Impacts on Soil Microbial Communities and Ecosystem Functions

Open access
Bandopadhyay, Sreejata, Martin-Closas, Lluis, Pelacho, Ana M., DeBruyn, Jennifer M.·2018·Frontiers in Microbiology

Abstract

Agricultural plastic mulch films are widely used in specialty crop production systems because of their agronomic benefits. Biodegradable plastic mulches (BDMs) offer an environmentally sustainable alternative to conventional polyethylene (PE) mulch. Unlike PE films, which need to be removed after use, BDMs are tilled into soil where they are expected to biodegrade. However, there remains considerable uncertainty about long-term impacts of BDM incorporation on soil ecosystems. BDMs potentially influence soil microbial communities in two ways: first, as a surface barrier prior to soil incorporation, indirectly affecting soil microclimate and atmosphere (similar to PE films) and second, after soil incorporation, as a direct input of physical fragments, which add carbon, microorganisms, additives, and adherent chemicals. This review summarizes the current literature on impacts of plastic mulches on soil biological and biogeochemical processes, with a special emphasis on BDMs. The combined findings indicated that when used as a surface barrier, plastic mulches altered soil microbial community composition and functioning via microclimate modification, though the nature of these alterations varied between studies. In addition, BDM incorporation into soil can result in enhanced microbial activity and enrichment of fungal taxa. This suggests that despite the fact that total carbon input from BDMs is minuscule, a stimulatory effect on microbial activity may ultimately affect soil organic matter dynamics. To address the current knowledge gaps, long term studies and a better understanding of impacts of BDMs on nutrient biogeochemistry are needed. These are critical to evaluating BDMs as they relate to soil health and agroecosystem sustainability.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.3389/fmicb.2018.00819

Cites

66 of 66 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 66 references

Cited by

See all 482

Metadata

Authors
Bandopadhyay, S., Martin-Closas, L., Pelacho, A. M., & DeBruyn, J. M.
Venue
Frontiers in Microbiology
Published
2018-04-26
Volume
9
Pages
819-819
ISSN
1664-302X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2801351933
Cited by
482
References
66
FWCI
29.81
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Biodegradable Plastic Mulch Films: Impacts on Soil Microbial Communities and Ecosystem Functions. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.3389/fmicb.2018.00819
The paper
Bandopadhyay, S., Martin-Closas, L., Pelacho, A. M., & DeBruyn, J. M. (2018). Biodegradable Plastic Mulch Films: Impacts on Soil Microbial Communities and Ecosystem Functions. Frontiers in Microbiology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2018.00819

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.