DEVELOPMENT OF AN INDEX OF SOIL AGGREGATE STABILITY

Soil aggregate stability is an important parameter affecting soil credibility and soil crusting potential, and plays a key role in ecosystem functioning as it affects water, gas and nutrient fluxes and storage and, therefore, influences the activity and growth of plants in the soil. Laboratory determination of this property is often viewed as unreliable due to inequity resulting from the common measurement techniques. As a result, a laboratory investigation was carried out on soils from two different fields (uprooted and un-uprooted oil palm fields) to develop an index for estimating soil aggregate stability using sodium chloride (NaCl) conductivity. The results of the study showed a good agreement between wet-sieved aggregate stability and relative conductivity from both study sites, with coefficient of determination from the 1:1 plots (between wet-sieved aggregate stability and relative conductivity) were 0.98 and 0.92 for the uprooted and un-uprooted oil palm fields, respectively.