A Comparison of the Differences in Soil Structure under Long-Term Conservation Agriculture Relative to a Secondary Forest

Luiz F. Pires (), Talita R. Ferreira, Fábio A. M. Cássaro, Hannah V. Cooper and Sacha J. Mooney
Additional contact information
Luiz F. Pires: Department of Physics, State University of Ponta Grossa (UEPG), Av. Carlos Cavalcanti 4748, Ponta Grossa 84030-900, Brazil
Talita R. Ferreira: Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS), Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), Campinas 13083-970, Brazil
Fábio A. M. Cássaro: Department of Physics, State University of Ponta Grossa (UEPG), Av. Carlos Cavalcanti 4748, Ponta Grossa 84030-900, Brazil
Hannah V. Cooper: Rothamsted Research, West Common AL5 2JQ, UK
Sacha J. Mooney: Division of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington Campus, Sutton Bonington LE12 5RD, UK

Agriculture, 2022, vol. 12, issue 11, 1-14

Abstract: Conservation agriculture is increasingly preferred to conventional methods due to its benefits in promoting more sustainable soil management. Our study aims to compare physical and morphological properties, at the microscale, of soils under long-term no tillage (NT) and minimum-tillage (MT) to adjacent ‘natural’ soils under long-term secondary forest (SF). Soil aggregates of c. 2 cm length were imaged by X-ray Computed Tomography (XCT). The three-dimensional (3D) images were segmented and analyzed in order to assess properties such as porosity, number of pores, degree of anisotropy, pore shape, volume classifications, Euler number for pore connectivity, and pore tortuosity. The pore architecture of soils under NT and MT, for c. 40 years, was similar to that from the SF in terms of imaged porosity, pore size, and shape distributions, as hypothesized in our study. However, we observed some important differences; for instance, SF had larger, more connected, and more complex pores, likely due to the greater biological activity. In addition, SF had more isotropic pores than NT and MT, i.e., without preferential flow paths for water redistribution. Therefore, we concluded that long-term conservation agriculture was efficient at reversing structural damage typically associated with conventional, intensive agriculture, but some large differences remain, particularly concerning the pore network complexity and connectivity.

Keywords: aggregates; conservation agriculture; X-ray Computed Tomography; pore architecture; pore tortuosity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/12/11/1783/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/12/11/1783/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:12:y:2022:i:11:p:1783-:d:954743

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().