Effects of Land Use and Soil Management on Soil Quality in India’s Northeastern Himalayas

Quantitative evaluation of soil quality is needed to investigate the sustainability of a particular land use and soil management in relation to plant production and environmental quality. The present study aims to detect the most suitable soil quality indicators and assess the influence of the five most predominant land-use and soil management types [dense forest (DF), bun cultivation (BC), pine forest (PF), shifting cultivation (SC), and abandoned land after shifting cultivation (AS)] on soil quality of two districts in Meghalaya, India. Ninety-three soil samples were assembled and analyzed for different soil quality indicators. For a selection of indicators, the collected soil samples were subjected to principal component analysis, followed by the varimax rotation algorithm. Subsequently, selected indicators were transformed and assigned a score based on the linear scoring function. Significant (P<0.05) variations in soil quality were found across different land uses. The overall soil quality index was found to follow the following order: 0.91 (DF)>0.69 (SC)>0.63 (PF)>0.57 (BC)>0.37 (AS). Results denote that the quality degradation of the soils was due to anthropogenic activities. Soil organic carbon was observed to be a powerful soil indicator under prevailing land use. The method used in the present study proved to be sensitive to evaluate the soil quality and demonstrated that carbon management holds the key to improving the soil quality of the study area.