A comparison of some methods for soil organic carbon determination

Abstract

This study compared three dichromate‐oxidation methods adapted for use with 100‐mL digestion tubes and 40‐tube block digester (for controlled heating), the Walkley‐Black method, a loss‐on‐ignition procedure and an automated dry combustion method for the determination of organic carbon in soils of the northwestern Canadian prairie. The Walkley‐Black method required a correction factor of 1.40. The modified Tinsley method and the Mebius procedure, adapted for use with 100‐mL digestion tubes, recovered 95% and 98%, respectively, of soil carbon against the dry combustion procedure. The presence of elemental carbon in some soils probably caused, at least partially, the slightly incomplete recovery; thermal decomposition of dichromate may not have been accurately corrected for. A dichromate‐oxidation procedure with controlled digestion at 135°C gave 100% recovery, but somewhat more variable results. The loss‐on‐ignition procedure, even when allowance was made for clay content of the soils, was the least satisfactory of the methods tested. All procedures produced correlation coefficients of 0.980 or better against the dry combustion method.