Soil and water conservation measures improve soil carbon sequestration and soil quality under cashews |
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| Authors: | Gopal Ramdas Mahajan Bappa Das Sandrasekaran Manivannan Begur Lakshminarasimha Manjunath Ram Ratan Verma Sujeet Desai Rahul Mukund Kulkarni Ashish Marotrao Latare Reshma Sale Dayesh Murgaonkar Kiran Puna Patel Shaiesh Morajkar Ashwini Desai Natasha Barnes Heena Mulla |
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| Institution: | 1. Natural Resource Management, ICAR-Central Coastal Agricultural Research Institute, Old Goa, Goa, 403 402, India;2. ICAR - Indian Institute of Soil and Water Conservation Regional Centre, Fern Hill Post, Udhagamandalam, Tamil Nadu, 643 004, India;3. Division of Fruit Crops, ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Bengaluru, Karnataka, 560 089, India;4. Division of Crop Production, Indian Institute of Sugarcane Research, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, 226 002, India;5. Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 221 005, India;6. Biological Oceanography Division, CSIR – National Institute of Oceanography, Dona Paula, Goa, 403 004, India;7. Goa University, Taleigaon Plateau, Goa, India |
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| Abstract: | Land degradation is becoming a serious problem in the west coast region of India where one of the world's eight biodiversity hotspots, the ‘Western Ghats’, is present. Poor land management practices and high rainfall have led to increasing problems associated with land degradation. A long-term (13-year) experiment was done to evaluate the impact of soil and water conservation measures on soil carbon sequestration and soil quality at three different depths under cashew nut cultivation on a 19% slope. Five soil and water conservation measures - continuous contour trenches, staggered contour trenches, half-moon terraces, semi-elliptical trenches, and graded trenches all with vegetative barriers of Stylosanthes scabra and Vetiveria zizanoides and control were evaluated for their influence on soil properties, carbon sequestration, and soil quality under cashews. The soil and water conservation measures improved significantly the soil organic carbon, soil organic carbon stock, carbon sequestration rate and microbial activity compared to the control condition (without any measures). Among the measures tested, continuous contour trenches with vegetative barriers outperformed the others with respect to soil organic carbon stock, sequestration rate, and microbial activity. The lower metabolic quotient with the measures compared to the control indicated alleviation of environmental stress on microbes. Using principal component analysis and a correlation matrix, a minimum dataset was identified as the soil available nitrogen, bulk density, basal soil respiration, soil pH, acid phosphatase activity, and soil available boron and these were the most important soil properties controlling the soil quality. Four soil quality indices using two summation methods (additive and weighted) and two scoring methods (linear and non-linear) were developed using the minimum dataset. A linear weighted soil quality index was able to statistically differentiate the effect of soil and water conservation measures from that of the control. The highest value of the soil quality index of 0.98 was achieved with continuous contour trenches with a vegetative barrier. The results of the study indicate that soil and water conservation measures for cashews are a potential strategy to improve the soil carbon sequestration and soil quality along with improving crop productivity and reducing the erosion losses. |
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| Keywords: | Land degradation Microbial activity Microbial biomass carbon Minimum dataset Soil erosion Western Ghats |
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