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Abstract In the area of “returning farmland to forest” on the Loess Plateau in China, it is difficult to cultivate artificially planted trees into forests. In the current study, abandoned cultivated land after 10 years of natural restoration served as controls (CK), while the treatments included afforestation periods of 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 years. Soil samples were collected from various depths: 0–20, 20–40, 40–60, 60–80, to 80–100 cm. The findings revealed that with increasing years of artificial afforestation, soil pH gradually increased, and soil moisture content rose in the 0–20 cm layer while declining in deeper layers (20–100 cm) in the Maxian Mountain region of the Loess Plateau. Moreover, the total carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium content initially increased and then decreased with the duration of artificial afforestation, reaching peak values after 8 years. Contents of organic matter, ammonium nitrogen, nitrate nitrogen, available phosphorus, and available potassium in the same soil layer increased with each year of afforestation. However, upon reaching 10 years of artificial afforestation, the effective nutrient content in the 60–80 and 80–100 cm soil layers exhibited a decrease. The values of Integrated Fertility Index (IFI) in different afforestation years were ranked as follows: 8 years > 6 years > 10 years > 4 years > 2 year, but all of them were significantly smaller than those of natural restoration plot CK ( P < 0.05). Overall, soil fertility in the Maxian Mountain area of the Loess Plateau increases with each additional year of artificial afforestation. However, when the artificial afforestation period is 10 years, soil fertility decreases and marking a shift from enhancement to decline beyond this duration.
Mao et al. (Sat,) studied this question.