Effects of Changes in Land Use and Land Management on Soil Fertility in the Tropics

A special issue of Agronomy (ISSN 2073-4395). This special issue belongs to the section "Farming Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2019)

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Section of Geography, Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Øster Voldgade 10 1350 Copenhagen, Denmark
Interests: carbon and nutrient dynamics in tropical agro-ecosystems; effects of land use changes on carbon storage in soil and vegetation; climate change mitigation in the land use sector; adaptation to climate change in the land use sector; agro-Ecological intensification of small-scale tropical farming systems; shifting cultivation; soil quality indicators
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Dear Colleagues,

Land use changes have shaped the face of the Earth for thousands of years, but in recent decades they have been particularly rapid and extensive in the tropics. Some of the most widespread changes are transitions from traditional extensively managed land use systems to intensified systems focusing on production of cash crops. These intensified land uses put pressure on the soil system and impact soil fertility, but the extent, severity and consequences of these impacts remain poorly documented and understood.

This Special Issue seeks to assemble papers that advance our knowledge about effects of land use changes on soil fertility in the tropics and address the local or regional implications of these effects. We welcome papers that provide new field based empirical evidence from local case studies or experiments as well as review papers and meta-analyses. We are particularly interested in research that (i) sheds light on the interactions between land use and soil heterogeneity at various scales (ii) reports results at aggregated scales and in a spatially explicit way (iii) includes local perspectives on changes in soil fertility (iv) introduces novel methods of ascribing changes in soil fertility to land use changes (v) introduces new integrative methods of assessing changes in soil fertility. We strongly encourage submission of manuscripts based on interdisciplinary studies and manuscripts with a solution oriented approach.

Dr. Thilde Bech Bruun
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • Tropical farming systems
  • Agricultural Intensification
  • Assessment of Soil Fertility
  • Local knowledge
  • Interdisciplinary

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

12 pages, 666 KiB  
Article
Effect of Traditional Cultivation Management on CO2 Flux in the Dry Tropical Cropland of South India
by Mayuko Seki, Soh Sugihara, Hidetoshi Miyazaki, Ryoichi Araki, Muniandi Jegadeesan, Shun Ishiyama, Ueru Tanaka and Haruo Tanaka
Agronomy 2019, 9(7), 347; https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy9070347 - 1 Jul 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3174
Abstract
Soils in tropical croplands are becoming degraded because of soil carbon (C) depletion. Local farmers in South India use a specific management of traditional cultivation, i.e., broadcast seeding. However, for sustainable C management, there is no quantitative data on the CO2 flux [...] Read more.
Soils in tropical croplands are becoming degraded because of soil carbon (C) depletion. Local farmers in South India use a specific management of traditional cultivation, i.e., broadcast seeding. However, for sustainable C management, there is no quantitative data on the CO2 flux under this management. Our objectives were to (1) estimate the annual CO2 flux, and (2) evaluate the effect of traditional cultivation management (seeding rate) on the CO2 flux. Our field experiment was conducted in South India, from 2015 to 2017, including two cultivation periods with four cultivation management treatments (traditional cultivation management plot (T), fixed density plot (FD), no thinning plot (NT), and bare plot (B)). The seeding rate in the FD plot was ca. 50% of the T plot. We applied 1.1 Mg C ha−1 farmyard manure just before the experiment as a C input. We found that broadcasting, thinning, and cultivation increased soil moisture, while the CO2 efflux rate showed no significant difference between treatments throughout the experimental period. This indicates that cultivation management did not affect the CO2 flux. The total CO2 fluxes for two years were estimated at 2.2–2.7 Mg C ha−1. Our results indicate that it is necessary to apply larger or more frequent C inputs to prevent C depletion. Full article
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