Spatial variation in soil phosphomonoesterase in irrigated and dry farmlands

Spatial variation in the content of acid and alkaline phosphatase was surveyed on two farmlands. Two adjacent plots, one irrigated and cultivated and the other nonirrigated and cultivated, were marked on a 300-m-long transect with 10-m spacing. Soil samples were collected at the depths of 0–30 and 30–60 cm and were then analyzed for acid and alkaline phosphatase and other soil parameters. The analytical results were then subjected to classical statistical and geostatistical analysis. The results showed that the correlation coefficients of the phosphatase and clay, the silt, the sand, the mean weight diameter, the geometric mean diameter, the equivalent CaCO₃, the pH, the electrical conductivity, the organic carbon, the respiration, the Olsen available phosphorus, and the vesicular arbuscular mycorrhizae (VAM) spore numbers of the soils in the transect studied were highly significant. In both layers of the irrigated farmland, the coefficients of the variation of the acid phosphatase were relatively high and the coefficients of the variation of the alkaline phosphatase were relatively low compared to those of the dry farmland. Although the acid and alkaline phosphatase in the topsoil and subsoil of the farmlands exhibited a spatial dependence at the sampled scale, the stability of the spatial structures were markedly low. Published in Russian in Pochvovedenie, 2006, No. 5, pp. 569–573. The text was submitted by the authors in English.