Pedogenic effect and the impact of erosion factors on topsoil magnetic susceptibility enhancement

Abstract

The main aims of this study were to i) investigate the impact of erosion factors including land use, slope position, and lithology on magnetic susceptibility (MS) of soil, and ii) detecting the pedogenic effect on MS enhancement using simple methods, including median absolute deviation (MAD), topsoil-subsoil difference methods, MS magnitude and Dearing’s model. Soil cores were sampled along five slope positions in two transects selected in forested and cultivated lands in a watershed located in north of Morocco. The results showed higher values of MS in the upperslopes in forested land due to soil stability, and lower ones in middleslopes and lowerslopes due to soil erosion. However, MS is higher in cultivated land in middleslopes due to soil deposition and it is lower in the upperslopes due to erosion. The results confirmed the pedogenic effect on MS. This is confirmed by i) enhanced Forster factor and low values of magnetic susceptibility background, ii) dominance of ultrafine super-paramagnetic/stable single-domain ferrimagnetic grains in almost all studied soils, and iii) absence of anomaly in MAD data set and pertinence of the results of MAD and topsoil-subsoil difference methods.