Water-stability of soil aggregates in relation to selected properties

摘要

The stability of soil aggregates in water is an important soil physical property for evaluating the potential of agricultural soils to erode and elucidating the mechanisms of soil erosion. In this study we used aggregates from 15 surface soil samples in Italy to evaluate the influence of intrinsic soil physical, chemical and mineralogical properties on aggregates stability (AS). The aim was to develop a model for predicting AS from a subset of these soil properties. The index of stability used is the mean-weight diameter of water-stable aggregates (MWD). The best-fit model was developed with soil properties from the physical, chemical and mineralogical subsets. This model shows that the most important soil properties which influence the AS of these soils include ratio of total sand to clay, concentrations of iron oxide, magnesium oxide, organic matter, silica/alumina ratio, chlorite, feldspar, and muscovite. (author). 40 refs, 4 tabs. (Atomindex citation 26:052407)