Do Soil Health Indicators Correlate with the Incidence of Disease caused by Soilborne Pathogens ?
Abstract
It is difficult to quantify "health" in general and "soil health" in particular. Soil health assessments aim to achieve this objective, and to do so assemble indicator values for physical, chemical and biological soil properties. But does a strong health score mean the soil is healthy in the sense of absence of disease? Notably, indices accounting for soil borne pathogens are absent from either the NRCS - promoted Soil Management Assessment Framework (SMAF) and from the Comprehensive Assessment of Soil Health (CASH) developed at Cornell University.
In the research presented here, we compared the health indicator scores (according to the CASH framework) for 40 arable soils that had been planted to potato. 20 of these soils were selected because the potato crop had shown severe signs of Verticillium wilt, the other 20 soils were disease free or had crops that exhibited only very minor damage from verticillium wilt. In addition to full soil health assessments following the CASH framework, we also obtained DNA-based information on microbial community composition. We found that certain individual indicators, such as permanganate oxidisable carbon, differed between "healthy" and "diseased" potato fields in a highly significant manner. Overall health scores (composed of 12 individual contributing indicators), however, were not significantly different between healthy and diseased potato fields. We conclude that total health scores may be most useful when seen as an early warning system for impending danger to the sustainability of the management system. It seems that specific soil health problems may go along with variations in very specific indicator values, or in the language of human health, with specific symptoms.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.B21F2378K
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0428 Carbon cycling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0470 Nutrients and nutrient cycling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0486 Soils/pedology;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES