Summary
Soil movement from plot to plot in long-term field experiments caused by tillage, soil fauna, wind, and water leads to experimental errors. The paper attempts to quantify the total movement in current long-term field experiments.
A soil movement model was fitted to soil-phosphorus (P) recordings of two 90-year-old field experiments. The model fitted well and indicated why the soil P concentration of the unmanured plots had increased for many years. The removal of P by crops from the unmanured plots had simply been more than compensated for by the soil exchange between the unmanured plots and the adjacent P-fertilized ones.
Furthermore, the model was used for simulating soil movement in 21 of the worlds more than 50-year-old field experiments assuming the same rate of soil transport as estimated before. The simulations showed that on average of these experiments only 28% of the plough-layer soil present in their net-plots (the central quarter of each plot) to day should originate from the plough-layer soil that was inside the plots when the experiments started.
The work indicates that the movement of soil is a serious general problem in long-term field experiments, a problem with implications for our understanding of long-term processes in agro-ecosystems.
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Sibbesen, E. Soil movement in long-term field experiments. Plant Soil 91, 73–85 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02181820
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02181820