Landscape Conditions’ Influence on Soil Properties of Arable Land on a Smooth Slope in a Glaciolacustrine Plain

Аннотация

To establish a landscape-focused experiment, the soil cover of an agricultural land unit was studied on a smooth slope of a glaciolacustrine plane, and the factors and parameters of spatial differentiation were determined for several physical, physicochemical, and agrichemical properties. Various degrees of differentiation for certain properties associated with the characteristics of parent rocks were revealed along with the geochemical regimes and the nature of human impact. A significant heterogeneity was recorded in thickness of eluvial horizons, in degree of gleying, soil structure, and organic matter and nitrogen content; moderate heterogeneity was observed in terms of soil texture, physical and chemical properties, and nutritional regime. The main cause for variation of soil properties in the agricultural landscape was the heterogeneity of moraine parent rock: its physical, chemical, and agrochemical properties varied by 19–59%. Natural and human-induced processes in soil formation led to a 2.6-times reduction in the average coefficient of variation for these properties in the arable layer (from 36 to 14%). A number of agrochemical properties became 1.3–1.9 times more heterogeneous due to sheetflood erosion in the transitional eluvial facies, and they became three times more heterogeneous in the eluvial facies as a result of uneven application of organic fertilizers.