Physical Indicators of Soil Quality in Relation to Soil Erodibility Under Different Land Uses

Physical indicators of soil quality in relation to soil erodibility were evaluated in the submontaneous tract of Punjab (India). A field experiment was conducted with both natural and simulated rainfall conditions under four land uses—barren, cultivated, grassland, and forest. Sustainability index approach (Gomez, Kelly, Syers, and Coughlan, 1996 Gomez , A. A. , D. E. S. Kelly , J. K. Syers , and K. J. Coughlan 1996 . Measuring sustainability of agricultural systems at the farm level , pp. 401 – 410 , in J. W. Doran and A. J. Jones , eds., Methods for Assessing Soil Quality . SSSA Special Publication Number 49, Soil Science Society of America, Inc. , Madison , WI . [Google Scholar]) and cumulative rating approach (Shukla, Lal, and Ebinger, 2004 Shukla , M. K. , R. Lal , and M. Ebinger . 2004. Soil quality indicators for the North Appalachian experimental watersheds in Coshocton, Ohio. Soil Science 169:195–205.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) were used to measure the sustainability in terms of soil erodibility. According to the sustainability index approach at the Ballowal Saunkhri-I, Ballowal Saunkhri-II, and Saleran locations, only the forest land use system is sustainable. At the fourth location—Kokowal Majari—all four land uses were observed to be sustainable with respect to soil erodibility or soil physical quality. The mean sustainability indices were observed to be highly correlated with the respective soil erodibility values under natural (r = −0.83) and simulated (r = −0.87) rainfall conditions. The cumulative rating approach had a significant positive correlation with soil erodibility both under natural (r = 0.75) and simulated (r = 0.81) rainfall conditions. There was a strong correlation between the sustainability index and cumulative rating (r = −0.93). In conclusion, the sustainability index approach was found to be more suitable for assessing the sustainability of the system in terms of soil erodibility as it required less soil data input and had a higher correlation with soil erodibility. However, the sustainability index provided two categories of sustainability compared to the cumulative rating which produces five categories.