Summary
As Electro-Ultra-Filtration offers the possibility for a rapid measurement of the “intensity” parameter of plant nutrients, it was examined whether or not the integration of the buffer power would improve information generated, by this technique and so an experiment was conducted to answer this question of the importance of Zn buffer power on Zn nutrition of maize. The experimental soil was dressed with graded amounts of soluble Zn and equilibrated for 15 days after which separate portions of it were extracted with DTPA to determine Zn “quantity” and by the Electro-Ultra-Filtration technique (EUF) to determine Zn “intensity”. The same soil was cropped to maize to monitor Zn uptake. At first Zn concentration in the plant top, determined by inductively coupled plasma emission spectrophotometry, and total Zn uptake by plant top, were correlated with the Electro-Ultra-Filtrable zn at seeding and at harvest as simple linear regression functions. When the corresponding Zn buffer power was also integrated into the computations as a multiple regression function, there was a remarkable improvement in the correlation coefficients so obtained and as much as 66% of the variance in Zn concentration in the plant top could be attributed to the variance in Zn “intensity” and the corresponding Zn buffer power. The Zn buffer power measures the rate of Zn replenishment around plant roots during crop growth. Since the EUF technique offers the possibility for rapid measurement of Zn “intensity”, the predictability of routine soil testing by this method could be substantially enhanced by integrating the Zn buffer power also into the computations.
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Prabhakran Nair, K.P. Zinc buffer power as an important criterion for a dependable assessment of plant uptake. Plant Soil 81, 209–215 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02197153
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02197153