Soil properties at slope – the advantage of magnetic susceptibility application

Abstract

Summary The information about the spatial distribution of the soil properties at slope is important for land managements as well as for the soil protection. The different agronomic indicators such as the organic carbon content, physical clay (the sum of particles with the size less than 0.01 mm) can be easily detected by magnetic susceptibility (MS) measurements of soil. According to our results, the relation between the studied parameters is strong. Spearman correlation coefficient is: ρ= -0.755. This suggests that erosion processes have a significant impact on soil loss of small fractions, i.e. leads to the particle size decrease. From the other hand, the described correlation concludes the destroying of the water regime of eroded soils in conditions of unstable or insufficient moisture. We obtained much higher correlation of the MS and soil properties comparing with earlier received correlation between soil properties (physical clay and organic carbon). The correlation between the humus content and MS strongly depends of the land use. For the local level (area 100 ha): ρ = 0.68. For the bigger areas of about 2000 ha, the correlation was much lower because of the inhomogeneous of the physical, chemical, and geomorphological parameters of the arable lands.