Application of soil quality indices to assess the status of agricultural soils irrigated with treated wastewaters

Abstract

Abstract. The supply of water is limited in some parts of the Mediterranean region, such as southeastern Spain. The use of treated wastewater for the irrigation of agricultural soils is an alternative to using better-quality water, especially in semi-arid regions. On the other hand, this practice can modify some soil properties, change their relationships and influence soil quality. In this work two soil quality indices were used to evaluate the effects of irrigation with treated wastewater in soils. The indices were developed studying different soil properties in undisturbed soils in SE Spain, and the relationships between soil parameters were established using multiple linear regressions. These indices represent the balance reached among properties in "steady state" soils. This study was carried out in four study sites from SE Spain irrigated with wastewater, including four study sites. The results showed slight changes in some soil properties as a consequence of irrigation with wastewater, the obtained levels not being dangerous for agricultural soils, and in some cases they could be considered as positive from an agronomical point of view. In one of the study sites, and as a consequence of the low quality wastewater used, a relevant increase in soil organic matter content was observed, as well as modifications in most of the soil properties. The application of soil quality indices indicated that all the soils of study sites are in a state of disequilibrium regarding the relationships between properties independent of the type of water used. However, there were no relevant differences in the soil quality indices between soils irrigated with wastewater with respect to their control sites for all except one of the sites, which corresponds to the site where low quality wastewater was used.

Assessment of environmental soil quality around Sonepur Bazari mine of Raniganj coalfield, India

“…Indexing involves three main aspects: (1) choosing appropriate indicators for a minimum data set, (2) transforming the indicators to scores, and (3) combining the scores into an index (Sinha et al, 2009). Soil quality indices are useful to differentiate between the degraded status of soils (Morugán-Coronado et al, 2013). Though there are a few studies on the assessment of soil parameters on coal mine soil (Mukhopadhyay and Maiti, 2014;Tizado and Núñez-Pérez, 2014;Pallavicini et al, 2015;Haigh et al, 2015;Chaudhuri et al, 2015), integrated estimation of soil quality is limited.…”

“…Moreover an integrated index is essential for quantitative comparison of different soils. Several indices have been proposed to assess soil quality, which were mostly microbial in nature and for agricultural soils (Sharma et al, 2005;Masto et al, 2007aMasto et al, , 2008aOzgoz et al, 2013;Sinha et al, 2009;Morugán-Coronado et al, 2013;van Leeuwen et al, 2015). Indexing involves three main aspects: (1) choosing appropriate indicators for a minimum data set, (2) transforming the indicators to scores, and (3) combining the scores into an index (Sinha et al, 2009).…”

Changes in soil quality after converting <i>Pinus</i> to <i>Eucalyptus</i> plantations in southern China

“…A soil quality index (SQI) was proposed for quantifying the combined biological, chemical and physical response of soil to land use and soil/crop management practices (Andrews and Carroll, 2001;Andrews et al, 2002). It provides an intelligible and more holistic measurement of soil quality and, in recent years, the SQI has been used to assess the impacts of land use change, forest and cropland management and ecological restoration (Navas et al, 2011;Morugán-Coronado et al, 2013;Tesfahunegn, 2013). Methods used to calculate SQI include expert opinion and principal component analysis (PCA) (Andrews et al, 2002), with the latter more widely used in recent studies (Navas et al, 2011).…”

Practices for rehabilitating bauxite‐mined areas and an integrative approach to monitor soil quality

“…Ideally, SQI estimates should also take into account the variation of the weight of the selected indicators across different seasons, particularly for microbiological indicators. Further improvements on proper application and suitability of SQI estimates could be obtained whenever proper validation can be made (Morugán-Coronado et al, 2013).…”