Paddy Soil Tillage Impacts on SOC Fractions

Quantifying soil organic carbon (SOC) has long been considered to improve our understanding of soil productivity, soil carbon dynamics, and soil quality. And also SOC could contribute as a major soil management factor for prescribing fertilizers and controlling of soil erosion and runoff. Reducing tillage intensity has been recommended to sequester SOC into soil. On the other hand, determination of traditional SOC could barely identify the tillage practices effect. Physical soil fractionation has been reported to improve interpretation of soil tillage practices impact on SOC dynamics. However, most of these researches were focused onupland soils and few researches were conducted on paddy soils. Therefore, the objective of this research was to evaluate paddy soil tillage impact on SOC by physical soil fractionation. Soils were sampled in conventional-tillage (CT), partial-tillage (PT), no-tillage (NT), and shallow-tillage (ST)plots at the National Institute of Crop Science research farm. Samples were obtained at the three sampling depth with 7.5-cm increment from the surface and were sieved with 0.25- and 0.053-mm screen. Soil organic carbon was determined by wet combustion method. Significant difference of SOC contentwas found among sampling soil depth and soil particle size. SOC content tended to increase at the ST plot with increasing size of soil particle fraction. We conclude that quantifying soil organic carbon by physical soil particle fractionation could improve understanding of SOC dynamics by soil tillage practices.