Combining chemical and organic treatments enhances remediation performance and soil health in saline-sodic soils

Abstract

We investigated the individual and synergistic impact of gypsum, elemental sulfur, vermicompost, biochar, and microbial inoculation on soil health improvement in degrading calcareous saline-sodic soils. We developed Linear and nonlinear soil health quantification frameworks to assess the efficacy of remedial practices. The combined inoculated chemical and organic treatments; gypsum + vermicompost and elemental sulfur + vermicompost with 134% (0.29 versus 0.68) and 116% (0.29 versus 0.62) increases in nonlinear index, significantly increased the efficacy of amendments compared with control. An increase in the overall soil health index ranged between 12 to 134%. Microbial inoculation further enhanced the impact of treatments on soil health. Soil health properties included in the indexes explained 29 to 87% of the variance in wheat growth. The findings bring insight into the cost-effective and environmentally sustainable practices to recover degraded saline-sodic soils. Furthermore, the introduced soil health indexes offer a quantitative evaluation of soil remediation strategies.

Ameliorating saline‐sodic soils: A global meta‐analysis of field studies on the influence of exogenous amendments on crop yield

“…Wu et al, 2013), and also help increase the soil's cation exchange capacity (Dahlawi et al, 2018;Mahmoud et al, 2019). Mixed amendments combine the advantages of both inorganic and organic materials (Rezapour et al, 2023;, providing a comprehensive solution that enhances soil fertility while effectively removing salts (Rezapour et al, 2023). Notably, the effect size of crop yield was significantly negatively correlated with those of ECe and ESP (Figure 9a,b), further indicating that the decrease in soil ECe and ESP played a crucial role in improving crop yield.…”