Atributos microbiológicos, físicos e químicos de solos na região oeste paulista

Abstract

The fertility and microbial activity in soil have been often used to indicate changes in soil quality. The microbial activity directly interacts with environmental conditions, soil types and different agricultural production systems used. Despite advances in this area, it is still a great challenge to define good indicators of soil quality, their interactions and behavior over time. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess the current state of soils under pastures in the western region of São Paulo using the evaluation and correlation of the microbial attributes and soil fertility. We performed on 108 soil samples, collected in settled pastures, analysis of thirteen variables in a laboratory within the microbial attributes, fertility and soil texture. The findings of the evaluation of the microbial demonstrated that microbial biomass had the lowest coefficient of variation, normal distribution of frequency and significantly correlated with most variables analyzed, on the other side, within the attributes of fertility of the soil, pH had the lowest rate variation while the phosphorus content demonstrated large variations with disproportionately high frequency among other variables, indicating the current status of soil degradation. The soil microbial biomass can be considered a good indicator for microbiological evaluation in these soils. The principal component analysis demonstrated that 51% of the variation was concentrated in the axis 1 and 2, which is considered representative for multivariate environmental assessment