Soil acidification and the importance of liming agricultural soils with particular reference to the United Kingdom
By K. Goulding. Soil use and management, 2016
751 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Soil acidification is caused by a number of factors including acidic precipitation and the deposition from the atmosphere of acidifying gases or particles, such as sulphur dioxide, ammonia and nitric acid. The most important causes of soil acidification on agricultural land, however, are the application of ammonium‐based fertilizers and urea, elemental S fertilizer and the growth of legumes. Acidification causes the loss of base cations, an increase in aluminium saturation and a decline in crop yields; severe acidification can cause nonreversible clay mineral dissolution and a reduction in cation exchange capacity, accompanied by structural deterioration. Soil acidity is ameliorated by applying lime or other acid‐neutralizing materials. ‘Liming’ also reduces N2O emissions, but this is more than offset by CO2 emissions from the lime as it neutralizes acidity. Because crop plants vary in their tolerance to acidity and plant nutrients have different optimal pH ranges, target soil pH values in the UK are set at 6.5 (5.8 in peaty soils) for cropped land and 6.0 (5.3 in peaty soils) for grassland. Agricultural lime products can be sold as ‘EC Fertiliser Liming Materials’ but, although vital for soil quality and agricultural production, liming tends to be strongly influenced by the economics of farming. Consequently, much less lime is being applied in the UK than required, and many arable and grassland soils are below optimum pH.
Subfields: Biomaterials, Environmental Chemistry, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b22a313703a25d275b34f1eb17ee56e08c35bc71
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In Environmental Chemistry
Citations in the corpus
- Linking meta-omics to the kinetics of denitrification intermediates reveals pH-dependent causes of N2O emissions and nitrite accumulation in soil (2020, background): “Discussion 477 Liming, which has traditionally been a means to improve the fertility of acidic soils [68], is 478 known to cause changes in microbial community composition and diversity [69, 70].”
- Manganese in Plants: From Acquisition to Subcellular Allocation (2020, background): “On the other extreme, Mn toxicity can occur in poorly drained and in strongly acidic soils, where it is usually associated with other acidity-related soil fertility problems, such as aluminum toxicity and deficiencies of calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), and molybdenum (Mo) (Goulding, 2016).”
- Internet of Things (IoT) and Agricultural Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in smart farming: A comprehensive review (2020, background): “Farmers must regulate pH value by the utilization of alkaline or acidic fertilizers, which also improves also farming production [28] .”