Soil and Water Research (Mar 2018)

Effects of soil erosion by water under different tillage treatments on distribution of soil chemical parameters

  • Ivica KISIC,
  • Igor BOGUNOVIC,
  • Zeljka ZGORELEC,
  • Darija BILANDZIJA

DOI
https://doi.org/10.17221/25/2017-SWR
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 1
pp. 36 – 43

Abstract

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Soil losses by water erosion were studied under six different tillage treatments, which differ in depth and direction of tillage and planting during a twenty-year period (1995-2014) on Stagnosols in central lowland Croatia. Studied tillage treatments were: control plot (bare fallow-BF), ploughing up and down the slope to 30 cm (PUDS), no-tillage (NT), ploughing across the slope to 30 cm (PAS), very deep ploughing across the slope to 50 cm (VDPAS), and subsoiling to 50 cm + ploughing to 30 cm across the slope (SSPAS). The paper presents the following chemical parameters: soil pH, soil organic matter (OM), plant available phosphorus (P-P2O5), plant available potassium (K-K2O), total carbon content (Ctot), total nitrogen content (Ntot) and CN ratio of non-eroded soil and soil loss from studied treatments. All soil sediments had significantly higher content of the studied parameters compared to non-eroded soil. The overall respective levels of OM, Ctot, Ntot, P-P2O5 and K-K2O loss by eroded soil were as follows: 0.86 (NT) - 10.86 (BF) t/ha, 0.10 (SSPAS) - 2.60 (BF) t/ha, 0.015 (SSPAS) - 0.392 (BF) t/ha, 0.012 (NT) - 0.173 (BF) t/ha and 0.017 (SSPAS) - 0.158 (BF) t/ha. No-tillage and treatments with tillage across the slope (PAS, VDPAS, SSPAS) proved to be much more efficient in storing investigated soil nutrients.

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