Abstract
National Highway may have damaging effect on soil chemical properties. In this study, a scale and assessment of selected chemical properties of tea growing soils with increasing sampling distance from National Highway have been documented. Top and sub soils from ten tea estates surrounding the National Highway of Dibrugrah and Tinsukia districts at the Upper Brahmaputra plain of India were analysed to understand the variation of the selected chemical properties influenced by National Highway. Significantly lower (p < 0.05) pHs and higher electrical conductivity were found in top soils than sub soils irrespective of sampling location from National Highway reflecting higher amount of soluble salt in top soils. Organic carbon (7.52–25.88 g kg−1), total nitrogen (0.70–2.47 g kg−1), available phosphorous (14.11–28.82 mg kg−1) and potassium (95.24–125.92 mg kg−1) were found significantly higher (p < 0.05) in top soils than sub soils irrespective of sampling locations. Total concentrations (g kg−1) of copper (0.012–0.034), iron (17.62–35.25), manganese (0.057–0.448) and zinc (0.039–0.097) in top soil were higher than the sub soil (copper: 0.012–0.029; iron: 15.57–31.15; manganese: 0.053–0.340 and zinc: 0.038–0.074). All the soils samples were found non-contaminated according to Indian standard. Application of generalized linear model revealed significant differences in metal content across the sampling distances from the National Highway. The novelty of this study is that tea growing soils in this region characterized by traffic-related build-up metals in top soils near to National Highway. Hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis were applied to form homogenous groups of the studied parameters.
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Abbreviations
- ANOVA:
-
Analysis of variance
- Av_K:
-
Available potassium
- Av_N:
-
Available nitrogen
- Av_P:
-
Available phosphorus
- DTE:
-
Tea estates situated at Dibrugarh
- EC:
-
Electrical conductivity
- GLM:
-
General linear model
- HCA:
-
Hierarchical cluster analysis
- LSD:
-
Least significant difference
- PCA:
-
Principal component analysis
- SD:
-
Standard deviation
- SOC:
-
Soil organic carbon
- TE:
-
Tea estate
- TTE:
-
Tea estates situated at Tinsukia
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Acknowledgements
The data of present work were collected as a part of Mr. Bidyot Bikash Gogoi’s pre-PhD thesis at Upper Assam Advisory Centre, Dikom, Dibrugarh, Assam, India. This work has been partially supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Govt. of India under the project “Unit of Excellence” (Tanmoy Karak) (DBT’s Sanction Order No: BT/564/ NE/U-Excel/2016) and “Twinning Project” between Tea Research Association (Tanmoy Karak) and CSIR-CIMAP (Puja Khare) (DBT’s Sanction Order No: BT/PR24706/NER/95/822/2017). Mr. Arup Borgohain expresses his thanks and gratitude to DBT for providing his fellowship. We would like to thank the tea estates management for providing opportunity to collect the soil samples as well as giving their time to talk to us. We also gratefully acknowledge the contribution and encouragement received from Dr. A. K. Barooah, Director, TRA, and Mr. Joydeep Phukan, Secretary, TRA in pursuing the research work. Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks and gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions that helped us a lot in improving this manuscript.
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BBG contributed to formal analysis, investigation, methodology, validation, writing—original draft. AB contributed to formal analysis, investigation, validation, writing—original draft. KK contributed to formal analysis, investigation, writing—original draft. JG contributed to project administration, supervision, visualization, writing—review and editing. RKP contributed to data curation, formal analysis, visualization, writing—review and editing. PK contributed to funding acquisition, resources, visualization, writing—review and editing. HM contributed to data curation, visualization, writing—review and editing. JS contributed to validation, writing—review and editing. TK contributed to conceptualization, funding acquisition, project administration, supervision, validation, writing—review and editing.
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Gogoi, B.B., Borgohain, A., Konwar, K. et al. National highway induced selected chemical properties of soils across tea bowl of India: scale and assessment. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. 19, 12019–12038 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-021-03789-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-021-03789-y