Ma. Beck et Pa. Sanchez, SOIL-PHOSPHORUS FRACTION DYNAMICS DURING 18 YEARS OF CULTIVATION ON ATYPIC PALEUDULT, Soil Science Society of America journal, 58(5), 1994, pp. 1424-1431
Traditional soil P test methods estimate plant available inorganic P b
ut ignore the less available inorganic and organic P pools. In low-inp
ut systems where fertilizer P additions are very low to nil, these les
s available P pools may be a better measure of potential plant availab
le P, particularly in highly weathered soils. The objectives of this s
tudy were to determine the size and changes in soil P pools in the non
fertilized and fertilized treatments of a long-term continuous cultiva
tion experiment established on a Typic Paleudult in Yurimaguas, Fern.
A modified version of the Hedley et al. procedure was used to sequenti
ally fractionate soil P into increasingly recalcitrant organic and ino
rganic pools. The use of path analysis highlights the interactions amo
ng P pools and the different roles of the pools in P cycling between t
he nonfertilized and fertilized system. For the fertilized system, the
NaOH-extractable inorganic P pool acts as a sink for fertilizer P but
desorption is rapid enough to maintain high levels of plant available
P. For this system, inorganic P pools explain 96% of the variation in
the level of available P. Organic P is the primary source of plant-av
ailable P in the nonfertilized system and explains 44% of the variatio
n in available P. Available P, measured by anion exchange resin, is de
pendent on crop residue (b values +/- standard error = 4.98 +/- 3.57),
whereas yield depends most strongly on the available P (0.16 +/- 0.11
) and on NaOH-extractable organic P (-0.17 +/- 0.11). The lack of stab
ility in organic P levels in the first 10 yr illustrates the need for
long-term experiments. The presented results support the notion that t
raditional soil P tests are inadequate for low- to no-input systems.