MULTIVARIATE STATISTICS OF FERTILITY PARAMETER FLUXES IN CEMENT-DUST-POLLUTED SOILS IN MFAMOSING, NIGERIA: IMPACT ON AGRICULTURE

Atim Asitok

doi:10.15414/jmbfs.2020.9.4.781-789

Abstract

This study investigated the impact of cement-dust pollution on the fertility status of agricultural soils to ascertain their health and suitability for cropping. Relevant soil nutrients and enzyme activities were determined from 12 control soil, 12 NPK-treated polluted soil and 12 un-amended polluted soil samples, using standard soil analytical and biochemical procedures. Soil microbial biomass-carbon was quantified by chloroform-fumigation-extraction (CFE) method. Cultivable aerobic bacterial count was determined on Tryptic Soy Agar (TSA) while cultivable fungal quantitation was performed on Czapek-Dox agar. Corn (Zea mays) yield served to evaluate pollutant effect on tested parameters. Principal component analysis (PCA) extracted two components, PC1 and PC2, from nine studied dependent variables (DVs) which explained 68.33% variability about the data. Number and membership of extracted components were confirmed by two clusters obtained by agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis (AHCA). Multivariate analysis of covariance revealed significant effect of soil type on the combined DVs when the effect of the covariate (planting period) was controlled. One-way analysis of covariance (one-way ANCOVA) revealed non-significant effect of planting period but a significant main effect of soil type on corn yield when controlling for the effect of the covariate. Relative to control soil, per cent loss in corn yield was 55.69% in cement dust-polluted soil but reduced to 36.07% in polluted soils treated with NPK. The research findings have shown that cement dust pollution significantly reduced corn yield and the stress may persist in agricultural soils amended with fertilizer.

Highlights

Zea mays L or maize is a very popular crop plant that thrives excellently in the tropical and warm sub-tropical Africa, Latin America and Asia, where it is primarily used as human food and animal feed owing to its large carbohydrate content (Olaniyan and Lucas, 2004)
Our study originally evaluated 12 fertility parameters including soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (TN), available phosphorus (AvP), pH, soil moisture content (SMC), dehydrogenase activity (DHA), acid phosphatase activity (ACPA), alkaline phosphatase activity (ALPA), β-glucosidase activity (BGA), bacterial count (LOG10BC), fungal count (LOG10FC) and soil microbial biomass-carbon (SMB-C)
Our observations show that both component extraction and variable clustering were performed on the basis of variable relationship to soil microbial biomass-carbon

Summary

Introduction

Zea mays L or maize (corn) is a very popular crop plant that thrives excellently in the tropical and warm sub-tropical Africa, Latin America and Asia, where it is primarily used as human food and animal feed owing to its large carbohydrate content (Olaniyan and Lucas, 2004). In the ancient city of Calabar, Nigeria, where a cement factory is located near agricultural farmlands, surrounding soils have been reported to yield poorly, even after fertilizer application. This has sparked off youth restiveness in the area with frequent kidnap of Health and Tertiary Institution workers. Multivariate statistical tools, namely, correlation analysis (CA), principal component analysis (PCA), agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis (AHCA) and multivariate analysis of co-variance (MANCOVA) were used These approaches have earlier been reported as successful and reliable in studies on fertility parameters of humic soil cultivated with coffee (Silva and Lima, 2012), trace metal contamination of sediments (Benson et al, 2016), soil fertility parameters around nuclear power plant (Shinde et al, 2016), determination of soil pedoenvironmental indicators (Oliveira et al, 2017) and soil fertility relationships for predicting environmental persistence of pollutants (Katseanes et al, 2017)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion