Abstract
Available potassium (AVK) in the soil of cropland is one of the most important factors determining soil quality and agricultural productivity. Thus, it is crucial to understand the variation of AVK and its influencing factors for sustaining soil fertility and mitigating land degradation. Farm households are the ultimate land users, and their land-use behaviors inevitably play an important role in the variation of AVK. This paper, therefore, aims to explore the effects of households’ land-use behaviors on soil AVK from spatial and temporal perspectives. Taking an urban peripheral region in Northeast China as the study area, we firstly use geostatistics (Kriging interpolation) and GIS tools to map out the spatial AVK distributions in 1980, 2000, and 2010, based on soil sampling data points, and then assess the impacts of land-use behaviors on AVK using econometric models. The results show that, although the AVK content in the study area has a largely downward trend over the 30 years, there are distinct trends in different stages. The disparity of trends can be attributed to the changes in households’ land-use behaviors over time. The spatial variation of AVK is also substantial and intriguing: the closer to the urban area, the greater the decline of soil AVK content, while the farther away from the urban area, the greater the rise of soil AVK content. This spatial disparity can too be largely explained by the obvious differences in households’ land-use behaviors in various regions.
Highlights
China faces the great challenge of meeting the ever-increasing food demand, due to its large and ever-growing population and dietary shifts accompanying rapidly increasing income, with scarce agricultural land
While much attention has been focused on maintaining the arable land area—as reflected by the so-called “cropland red line” policy, aiming to maintain at least 1.8 billion mu (i.e., 0.12 billion ha) area of quality arable land, the deterioration of soil quality and land degradation has long been overlooked
Our casestudy studyarea, area,isislocated located in in the km away from from the center of Shenyang, which is the only mega-city in the three northeastern provinces of the center of Shenyang, which is the only mega-city in the three northeastern provinces of China
Summary
China faces the great challenge of meeting the ever-increasing food demand, due to its large and ever-growing population and dietary shifts accompanying rapidly increasing income, with scarce agricultural land. Soil preservation has been recognized as one of the most important factors restricting food security and agricultural product safety in China [4,5]. Soil available potassium (AVK) determined by ammonium acetate leaching-flame photometric method is an effective method that determines soil availability of potassium, which can be can directly absorbed and utilized by plants [6,7]. It is a good indicator of the supply capacity of potassium nutrient and soil fertility of cropland, which in turn affects the yield and quality of crops [8,9]. The study on the spatial and temporal variation of AVK in soil and its influencing factors are critical for monitoring the dynamic evolution characteristics of cropland soil fertility and scientific planning and management of croplands
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