Abstract
A study was conducted to determine the status of soil properties after enrichment planting in comparison to an adjacent secondary forest and to evaluate the effect of enrichment planting of Shorea macrophylla (de Vriese) on the soil fertility status with special reference to Soil Fertility Index (SFI) and Soil Evaluation Factor (SEF) at Sampadi Forest Reserve, Sarawak. The study sites were stands rehabilitated in different years (1996: SM96; 1997: SM97; 1998: SM98; 1999: SM99) and secondary forest (SF). Findings indicated that the soils at rehabilitation sites and SF were strongly acidic in nature, with pH less than 5.50, poor soil exchangeable bases, and nutrient status. The soils were relatively of sandy clay loam to sandy clay. Principal Component Analysis revealed the three most significant components of the soil properties which explained 76.3% of the total variation. At surface soils, SFI was correlated with tree growth parameters of S. macrophylla, indicating that SFI is an applicable soil quality index as compared to SEF. Notwithstanding, a significant association was found between soil available phosphorus and planted S. macrophylla, indicating that soil phosphorus is a better indicator than SFI. Further studies on other environmental factors influencing tree growth performance, early establishment of experimental reforestation at nursery, and field should be implemented to obtain the initial data on seedling growth performance prior to outplanting.
Highlights
Many countries throughout the world are facing acute scarcity of lands for food production due to the rapid increase of population and limited land resources, which causes people to convert forestland into agricultural, horticultural, plantations, and pastoral land for cattle settlements or mining [1]
The assessment on the status of soil physicochemical properties showed that the soil properties are significantly varied between the rehabilitation sites (SM96, SM97, SM98, and SM99) and secondary forest (SF)
Soil total carbon and total nitrogen in the secondary forest were significantly higher than those of the rehabilitation sites, showing that a large pool of fresh organic matter was derived from the above vegetation in the surface and subsurface soils
Summary
Many countries throughout the world are facing acute scarcity of lands for food production due to the rapid increase of population and limited land resources, which causes people to convert forestland into agricultural, horticultural, plantations, and pastoral land for cattle settlements or mining [1]. Approximately 60% or 850 million hectares of the total forest area between the year 1950 and 2000 have been degraded and are difficult to regenerate due to chemical, biological, and physical barriers [2] This has led to the attention of developing restoration or rehabilitation practices on degraded secondary forest [3,4,5,6,7] as to preclude further degradation [8, 9] by means of improving the site productivity and quality [10, 11]. Enrichment planting system has been used as one of the promising techniques to recover and restore the degraded forestland in the tropics [3, 13, 14]
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