Interactive effect of land use systems on depth-wise soil properties and micronutrients minerals in North-Western, India

Salwinder Singh Dhaliwal; Vivek Sharma; Arvind Kumar Shukla; Janpriya Kaur; Rajeev Kumar Gupta; Vibha Verma; Manmeet Kaur; Vijay Kant Singh; Prabhjot Singh

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13591

Interactive effect of land use systems on depth-wise soil properties and micronutrients minerals in North-Western, India

Heliyon. 2023 Feb 10;9(2):e13591. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13591. eCollection 2023 Feb.

Authors

Salwinder Singh Dhaliwal¹, Vivek Sharma¹, Arvind Kumar Shukla², Janpriya Kaur¹, Rajeev Kumar Gupta¹, Vibha Verma¹, Manmeet Kaur¹, Vijay Kant Singh¹, Prabhjot Singh¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Soil Science, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, 141004, India.
² Indian Institute of Soil Science, Bhopal, 462038, India.

Abstract

Micronutrients play a vital role in improving growth and performance of different crops. Management of soil micronutrients for better crop production needs sound understanding of their status and causes of variability. Therefore, in order to evaluate the changes in soil properties and micronutrient contents of soils, an experiment was conducted with soil samples from six soil depths i.e. 0-10, 10-20, 20-40,40-60, 60-80 and 80-100 cm of four prominent land-use systems viz. forest, horticulture, crop land and barren land. Amongst these, the maximum contents of OC (0.36%), clay (19.4%), DTPA-Zn (1.14 mg kg^-1), Fe (11.78 mg kg^-1), Mn (5.37 mg kg^-1), Cu (0.85 mg kg^-1) and Ni (1.44 mg kg^_1) were observed in soils of forest land use system followed by horticulture, crop land and barren land, respectively. Also, soils of forest landpossessed 29.5, 21.3, 58.4, 51.8 and 44.0% higher DTPA-Zn, Fe, Mn, Cu and Ni as compared to crop land use system. Interactive influence of land use systems and soil depths on distribution of DTPA extractable micronutrients was found to be positive with maximum content at 0-10 cm depth of forest land use and lowest at 80-100 cm of barren land use system, respectively. Correlation analysis explicit positive and significant relationship of OC with DTPA Zn (r = 0.81), Fe (r = 0.79), Mn (r = 0.77), Cu (r = 0.84) andNi (r = 0.80), whereas the correlation results among DTPA micronutrients indicated the highest positivecorrelation of Ni with Cu (r = 0.95) and Mn (r = 0.93) followed by Fe with Zn (r = 0.93). Therefore, inclusion of forest and horticulture land use in crop lands or shift of land use from forest based to crop land resulted in renewal of degraded soil which could be beneficial for enhancing agricultural sustainability.

Keywords: DTPA extractable micronutrients; Land use systems; Soil depths; Soil properties.