Response of soil microbial biomass and respiration in heavy metal contaminated soil of Multan

摘要

The soil fertility depends on the maintenance of microbial processes and activities for the completion of nutrient cycles. The management practices of soil and man - made activities which add contaminants i.e., heavy metals in the soil potentially have long term effects over microbial diversity in different ecosystems. An experiment was conducted to see the effects of heavy metals on different activities (i.e., microbial biomass and respiration) of microorganisms which produce fertility within the agriculture soil. In this case, soil was collected from Agriculture Research Centre at Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan and samples were treated with different concentrations of Zn, Cu and Cd in single, duplicate and triplicate. The results showed that soil micr obial biomass and soil respiration were significantly (P<0.05) affected by Zn and Cu individually as well as in the combination of Zn, Cu. The rest Cd did not show any significant affect individually as well as in combination of other heavy metals.