Performance assessment of nanoparticulate lime to accelerate the downward movement of calcium in acid soil

Abstract

Calcium in conventional lime (CL) moves downward extremely slowly into the soil in the short term. To monitor the effects of using nanoparticulate lime (NL) in low affordable doses and in large doses on accelerating the downward movement of Ca in a simulated plough layer profile (0–25 cm), we ran a column leaching experiment with an acid soil with NL applied into the top 5 cm. The experiment evaluated a reference treatment (0 NL), three low doses of NL (8, 40 and 80 kg ha−1 = 0.02×, 0.1×, and 0.2× the NL needed to raise soil pH to 6.0 in the top 5 cm: NLRpH‐6), and two large doses (400 and 800 kg ha−1 = 1× and 2× NLRpH‐6). Over the short term (70 days), NL accelerated the downward movement of Ca, likely by mass flow of nanoparticles down soil micro‐ and macropores. Applying NL to the top 5 cm at 40 and 80 kg ha−1 was effective at increasing the downward movement of Ca and the neutralization of soil acidity (in terms of pH) to 20 cm depth, as well as rectifying Al toxicity (in terms of exchangeable Al) to ≤ the critical limit to 10 cm. NL at 80 kg ha−1 was most economically justified in terms of rectifying Al toxicity throughout the profile. Therefore, NL may introduce new and alternative application strategy that allowing lower rates of lime to be used and thereby offset economic constraints posed by high application rates.

Liming and Phosphating on growth, nutritional status and mycorrhizal colonization of yellow strawberry guava

“…Plant growth improvement in acid soils is due not only to the addition of basic cations (Ca and Mg), but to the reduction of Al toxicity (Brown et al, 2008;Abd El-Halim and Omae, 2019). Therefore, even at pH 4.45 (zero lime dose) strawberry guava did not have its growth affected, indicating that, although the highest lime dose had raised the soil pH to 5.65, this species does not need such a high pH during the growth phase provided that the soil Al contents are not high.…”

Multifunctional applications of biochar beyond carbon storage

“…In this definition, preserving soil biota is the key to improving soil health. In modern society, soil health is damaged by various anthropogenic activities, such as acidification [157,158], erosion [159][160][161], contamination [162,163], and compaction [164,165]. To feed the 9 billion people expected by 2050, more food should be produced sustainably in healthy soils with proper soil conservation and restoration strategies [166].…”

VIRS based detection in combination with machine learning for mapping soil pollution

“…Soils, in many places throughout the world, have been contaminated as a result of anthropogenic activities or natural processes (Hou et al, 2020b). Soil pollution is exacerbated by soil erosion (Boardman et al, 2019;Liao et al, 2019;Patriche, 2019) and acidification (Abd El-Halim and Omae, 2019;Tao et al, 2019). Soil degradation is thus threatening human health (Zhang et al, 2020), crop growth (Jia et al, 2020), and ecological system (Wang et al, 2020c), which weakens global efforts towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (O'Connor et al, 2020).…”