Cd. Tsadilas et al., THE AVAILABILITY OF SOIL BORON FRACTIONS TO OLIVE TREES AND BARLEY AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO SOIL PROPERTIES, Plant and soil, 162(2), 1994, pp. 211-217
Soil boron occurring in various forms was correlated with boron conten
ts in the leaves of olive trees in 51 and in barley leaves in 20 soils
. The amounts of boron: in soil solution (CwsB), non specifically adso
rbed (NsaB), specifically adsorbed (SaB), occluded in Mn oxides (MnoB)
, occluded in amorphous Fe-Al oxyhydroxides (FeoB), were correlated wi
th soil properties such as: organic matter content, pH, free aluminum
and iron oxyhydroxides (Ald, Fed), amorphous aluminum and iron oxyhydr
oxides (Alo, Feo), The later correlation studies were conducted on a t
otal number of 153 soil samples inclusive of the soils used for the pl
ant uptake investigations. The results show that the boron contents in
the leaves of olive trees were significantly correlated with FeoB, Cw
sB, SaB and MnoB but with CwsB, NsaB, SaB and FeoB in barley leaves. T
he respective correlation coefficients suggest that available forms of
soil boron vary with plant species. The hot water soluble boron was s
ignificantly correlated with all the fractions of boron studied except
MnoB, confirming its value as a measure of available soil boron. Howe
ver, the non significant (a = 0.05) correlation with MnoB, which show
significant correlation with the contents in the leaves of olive trees
and barley, suggest that this procedure does not extract significant
amounts of available B held in Mn oxyhydroxides. The highest amount of
CwsB originated from the Cws B and to a lesser degree from the SaB an
d NsaB. The correlation among the boron held in the forms studied and
the selected soil properties were either no significant or significant
with the highest correlation found between FeoB and pH and Feo.