ISSN:
1365-2389
Source:
Blackwell Publishing Journal Backfiles 1879-2005
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition
Notes:
This paper reports a procedure for determining the content of strongly fixed NH4+ in soil. The procedure consists of a Kjeldahl digestion followed by an acid attack of the residue with a 5 m HF:1 m HCl solution. Distillations after each of the two treatments recover different forms of NH4+. The procedure was tested on fine earth (〈 2 mm) and skeleton (〉 2 mm) fractions of two forest soils developed on sandstone parent material. In both soil fractions we evaluated three different forms of NH4+-N: (i) Kjeldahl, (ii) non-exchangeable and (iii) micaceous. The last is located in the interlayer of mica flakes larger than 50 μm that resist the Kjeldahl digestion and is considered strongly fixed. The total NH4+-N content of a soil is obtained by the summation of the Kjeldahl and the micaceous NH4+-N. In the soils under consideration, the micaceous form prevails in the skeleton because this fraction is richer in micas of sand size (〉 50 μm). Following the proposed procedure, we found that micas (muscovite and biotite) contain about 3000 mg kg–1 of NH4+-N in the interlayer. The presence of micaceous NH4+-N in soil is generally ignored because the skeleton is usually excluded from analyses, and the micas larger than 50 μm cannot be dissolved by the Kjeldahl treatments. The micaceous NH4+ is the least extractable form of NH4+-N, and we infer that it is the least available to plants.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2389.1999.00248.x
