Total soil C was influenced by soil depth, land use, soil type, soil drainage class, and geologic unit.
Precipitation is partitioned as snow, runoff, or infiltration depending on air temperature, land cover, soil depth, and previous soil moisture conditions.
Apart from exposition, inclination and soil depth, land use was an important factor to landslides in topsoils.
In order of decreasing strength of statistical relationship, soil depth, land use and season were all related to some aspects of soil macrofauna density, biomass and community composition.
Based on the interaction effect of land by soil depth, the highest mean value of the total nitrogen was recorded in the surface layers of the grazing and forest lands, while the lowest was observed in the surface and subsurface layers of the cultivated land (Table 5).
The effects of land use and soil depth on soil characteristics and SOC stocks in soil profiles were assessed by analysis of variance (ANOVA) using the generalized linear model (GLM) (SAS Institute Inc. 1985).
The particle size class of the soil in the two land uses and soil depth is sandy loam, indicating no variations in the parent material the soil is derived from.
Therefore, this study was proposed with the specific objective of assessing the soil fertility status of Vertisols in Girar Jarso District based on some selected soil physicochemical properties in three land uses along soil depth.
Considering the interaction effects of land use by soil depth, the highest (3.33%%) mean OC was recorded in the surface layer of the grazing land, whereas the lowest (0.94%%) mean OC was observed in the subsurface layer of the cultivated land (Table 5).
Similar to the particle density, the bulk density of soils of the study area showed significant variations due to land uses (P ≤ 0.01), soil depths (P ≤ 0.01) and interaction effects of land uses by soil depth (P ≤ 0.01) (Table 1).
