Relating Soil Available Zinc With Physicochemical Properties In New Alluvial Zone Of West Bengal, India

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to assess the dependency of available zinc on the physicochemical properties of soils. The soil samples were collected from 15 NBSS & LUP identified soil series of New Alluvial Zone of West Bengal, India. The soil samples were processed and analyzed for different standard physicochemical properties i.e. pH, EC, clay, organic carbon content, available nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, zinc, copper, iron, manganese, amorphous iron, aluminium and manganese oxide content. Among the studied parameters, pH, clay, organic carbon, amorphous iron and amorphous aluminium oxide showed significant correlations (-0.591*, 0.601**, 0.784**, 0.563*, 0.509* respectively) with available zinc. Multilayer Perceptron Network (MPN) in Artificial Neural Network (ANN) yielded organic carbon, clay, pH and amorphous iron content as the most important parameters to affect the availability of soil zinc. Further, using multiple linear regression modeling, it was found that changes in organic carbon and clay content together contribute 70.7% change in available zinc in soil wherein, organic carbon alone contributed to 62.4% change. Identification of crops based on their zinc requirement in appropriate textural conditions of soil as well as proper maintenance of soil organic carbon can be a promising option for judicious management of zinc in soil.