Compost amendments in agricultural ecosystems: confirmatory path analysis to clarify the effects on soil chemical and biological properties

• Published in: The Journal of agricultural science 2015-03, Vol.153 (2), p.282-295
• Main Authors: BELLINO, A., BALDANTONI, D., DE NICOLA, F., IOVIENO, P., ZACCARDELLI, M., ALFANI, A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agricultural ecosystems; Agricultural land; agricultural soils; agroecosystems; Agronomy; Aromatic hydrocarbons; Biological properties; Composting; Composts; computer software; Crops; Crops and Soils Research Papers; data collection; Ecosystems; Farming systems; Fertility; field experimentation; Incineration; Intensive farming; Landfills; Microbial activity; Municipal solid waste; Nutrient availability; Nutrient concentrations; Nutrient content; Nutrient dynamics; Organic matter; Organic wastes; Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; potassium; Respiration; Soil contamination; Soil fertility; Soil nutrients; Soil organic matter; soil pollution; Soil properties; temporal variation; Waste disposal sites
• ISSN: 0021-8596; 1469-5146; 1469-5146
• DOI: 10.1017/S0021859614000033

Compost use is increasingly proposed as a sustainable strategy to restore the fertility of degraded agricultural soils and to reduce landfill disposal or incineration of organic wastes. The effects of compost application on many soil physico-chemical and biological properties, as well as on soil contamination, have been investigated widely, but a model for the ecological interactions among them has never been developed. The aim of the present paper was to provide an integrated view of the causal processes induced by repeated compost amendments on agricultural soil properties. For this purpose, a confirmatory path analysis was performed to enable inferences to be drawn about the causal processes involving compost amendment, soil organic matter content, nutrient concentrations, microbial activity and soil contamination. The path analysis was performed on a dataset derived from a 3-year field trial carried out by the current authors in a Mediterranean intensive agricultural system, where 0, 15, 30 or 45 t/ha of certified compost from municipal solid wastes were annually applied. A script (‘cpa’) was developed using the R programming language and used to test 13 hypothetical models, expressed as directed acyclic graphs, against the observed data. Within the above-mentioned dataset, potassium and zinc available concentrations, microbial respiration and total polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) concentrations were selected as indicative of soil nutrient availability, microbial activity and organic contamination. The applied approach highlights that compost amendment directly influences all the other variables considered in the study and is the main determinant of the observed trends. Other important relationships are those among organic matter, nutrient availabilities, respiration and PAHs, as well as their temporal dynamics.