Rehabilitation of saline soil with biogas digestate, humic acid, calcium humate and their amalgamations

ABSTRACT

Amelioration of saline soil is a requisite in order to increase crop productivity. A soil incubation study was performed for 60 days using digestate, humic acid, calcium humate and their combinations to investigate the influence on physical, chemical, microbial and enzyme activities of saline soil. Overall, digestate combined with calcium humate followed by humic acid treatments have shown their potency in decreasing the soil pH, electrical conductivity (EC), and sodium ion (Na⁺) concentration, and increase in potassium ion (K ⁺), calcium ion (Ca ²⁺), magnesium ion (Mg ²⁺), mean weight diameter (MWD), soil enzyme activities, microbial biomass carbon (MBC), MBC: microbial biomass nitrogen (MBN) and soil respiration than control. The digestate, humic acid individually and their amalgamation evidenced greater MBN among all the treatments. The digestate alone efficiently improved the soil properties than humic acid and calcium humate individual groups except for the MWD where it is pronounced more in the latter groups. The greater metabolic quotient (qCO₂) was observed in control than organic matter amended treatments indicating the stress conditions. The increase in water-extractable organic matter (WEOM) with minimal aromaticity (specific ultraviolet absorbance at 254 nm-Suva ₂₅₄) in integrated amendments comprising groups, laid the ground reason to improve the properties of saline soil. Therefore, this study concludes that the fusion of fresh and humified substrates could facilitate reclamation.

KEYWORDS:

• Catalase
• pH
• qCO₂
• soil aggregation
• soil respiration
• WEOM

Acknowledgments

The financial support of the National Key R&D Program of China, project number 2017YFD0800801-03 is acknowledged. The authors also appreciate the support of the “key technologies and demonstrations of transformational clean energy” of CAS of China. University of Chinese academy of sciences (UCAS) was greatly acknowledged for providing housing allowance.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China [2017YFD0800801-03].