Could biochar amendment be a tool to improve soil availability and plant uptake of phosphorus? A meta-analysis of published experiments

Fitsum Tesfaye,Rongjun Bian,Stephen Joseph,Marios Drosos,Xiaoyu Liu,Jufeng Zheng,Genxing Pan,Kun Cheng,Xuhui Zhang,Lianqing Li

doi:10.1007/s11356-021-14119-7

Fitsum Tesfaye, Rongjun Bian + Show 8 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-14119-7

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Abstract

As one of the most important nutrients for plant growth, phosphorus was often poorly available in soil. While biochar addition induced improvement of soil structure, nutrient and water retention as well as microbial activity had been well known, and the effect of biochar soil amendment (BSA) on soil phosphorus availability and plant P uptake had been not yet quantitatively assessed. In a review study, data were retrieved from 354 peer-reviewed research articles on soil available P content and P uptake under BSA published by February 2019. Then a database was established of 516 data pairs from 86 studies with and without BSA in agricultural soils. Subsequently, the effect size of biochar application was quantified relative to no application and assessed in terms of biochar conditions, soil conditions, as well as experiment conditions. In grand mean, there was a significant and great effect of BSA on soil available P and plant P uptake by 65% and 55%, respectively. The effects were generally significant under manure biochar, biochar pyrolyzed under 300 °C, soil pH <5 and fine-textured soil, and soils that are very low in available P. Being significantly correlated to soil P availability (R2=0.29), plant P uptake was mostly enhanced with vegetable crops of high biomass yield. Overall, biochar amendment at a dosage up to 10 t ha−1 could be a tool to enhance soil availability and plant uptake of phosphorus, particularly in acid, heavy textured P-poor soils.

Highlights

Soil phosphorus (P) had been a major limiting factor for crop production on many tropical and subtropical soils (Norman et al 1995) and a continuous utilization at large amount of soil P by crops would eventually lead to a rapid depletion of available phosphorus pool in soil (Vuuren et al 2010)
Whereas, mean percentage change in soil available P was higher with low temperature (≤300 °C) biochars than with high temperature (>600 °C) biochars, while that in plant uptake did not vary much with pyrolysis temperature
While variation of the effect sizes was relatively smaller for plant uptake than for soil available pool, there were no significant differences between the experiment groups both on soil available P and plant P uptake

Summary

Introduction

Soil phosphorus (P) had been a major limiting factor for crop production on many tropical and subtropical soils (Norman et al 1995) and a continuous utilization at large amount of soil P by crops would eventually lead to a rapid depletion of available phosphorus pool in soil (Vuuren et al 2010). The. Availability of soil P was basically very closely correlated to soil pH (Adnan et al 2003) but soil P supply to crops depends on P-status of the parent material and its management along the farming history (Batjes 2011). Phosphorus immobilization was strong in acidic soils where phosphorus deficiency mostly observed (Adnan et al 2003). Environ Sci Pollut Res (2021) 28:34108–34120 croplands with P deficiencies were estimated at 5.7 billion ha (67% of total croplands), with severe phosphorus constraints for sustaining crop production in subtropical and tropical regions with highly weathered soils of the world (Hinsinger 2001; Zhang 2016). P fertilizers were applied at approximately 15 million tons each year to maintain the P supply to crops in world agriculture (Wang et al 2012)

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