Potential pollution and recommended critical levels of phosphorus in paddy soils of the southern Lake Tai area, China
Introduction
The increase in amount of phosphorus used together with long-term accumulation in soils would both be expected to result in greater overall losses of phosphorus to aquatic ecosystems Ahl, 1988, Edwards and Withers, 1998, Fisher et al., 1998. Like western developed countries such as the UK, the USA, Canada, France and Germany, China as a developing country is now paying more attention to the problem of lake eutrophication due to continuous and increasing losses of soil phosphorus by surface runoff.
In the southern Lake Tai area, rice production and phosphorus fertilizer application have a long history. Paddy soils are the main soil type in the area, up to 500,000 ha. In recent years, the application of phosphorus fertilizers to paddy soils has been increasing in order to enhance the per unit area yield of rice and other crops. In particular, rice, with less phosphorus requirements, is being replaced by rape, legumes, vegetables and other economic crops requiring more phosphorus. Random discharge of wastewater containing phosphorus is also an important source of phosphorus in agricultural soils of the area with the development of rural enterprises such as foodstuff processing plants, poultry breeding yards and phosphorus fertilizer mills. The increasing input of phosphorous into agricultural soils in this area has become an important environmental problem, including the eutrophication of Lake Tai. The aim of the research is to show a relationship between water quality in Lake Tai and local agricultural production according to the current soil phosphorus status, and to recommend a maximum accumulative application level of phosphorus fertilizers based on phosphorus adsorption experiments.
Section snippets
Sampling sites
Surface paddy soil samples (0–20 cm) were collected from four representative sites widely distributed in the southern Lake Tai area. In the past, all the sites were used for rice production and have a history of phosphorus fertilizer application. Now economic crops with higher phosphorus requirements have been planted in the sites and thus more phosphorus fertilizers have been applied to the agricultural fields. According to recent investigations, the annual dosage of phosphorus fertilizers is
Current soil phosphorus status and transport
Basic characteristics of these surface paddy soils and their TP are listed in Table 1. Given the soil pH, soil clay and organic matter contents, these soils are suitable for the growth of rice and other economic crops. In particular, the TP in all the paddy soils had been enriched and accumulated compared with the previous relevant analytical data and the TP (0.044%) in the original mother matters of the tested soil.
Compared with TP, RDP in the surface paddy soils was relatively low (Table 2),
Acknowledgements
This research work is a component part of a “100-talents engineering” project jointly supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Finance, the People's Republic of China. The authors also wish to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology, the People's Republic of China for its partial financial support (973 project no. G1999011808).
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