Regional Assessment of Soil Change in the Southwest Pacific

The Southwest Pacific region includes the 22 island nations of the Pacific1, New Zealand and Australia (Figure 15.1). The landscapes of the region are very diverse ranging from a large continental land mass through to tens of thousands of small islands across the enormous expanse of the southwest Pacific Ocean. There are extensive ancient flat lands through to some of the youngest and most tectonically active landscapes on the planet. Temperature and rainfall ranges are large because of the breadth of latitudes and elevations. As a consequence, the soils of the region are also diverse. The strongly weathered soils in humid tropical areas and the vast expanses of old soils across the Australian continent are particularly susceptible to disturbance and this is where some of the more intractable problems of soil management occur today

Small-scale spatial variability of selected soil biological properties

A strategy for sampling soil from intact monolith lysimeters was established based on measurements of spatial heterogeneity within the lysimeter area. This was part of an ongoing study to determine relationships between soil microbial diversity and nutrient loss by leaching. The sampling protocol had to allow for collection of soil on a regular basis (as opposed to destructive sampling) and ensure high spatial independence of subsamples. On each of two sites (one developed under organic crop management, the other under conventional crop management), ten 15-cm soil cores (sampling points) were taken from three areas (replicates) of 50-cm-diameter (lysimeter surface area) and separately analysed for biotic (microbial biomass carbon and nitrogen; arginine deaminase activity) and abiotic (total carbon and nitrogen) soil properties. The data was tested for variability, expressed as coefficient of variance (biotic and abiotic), and spatial heterogeneity using geostatistics (biotic properties). The biotic soil properties showed significant differences among sampling points, whereas the abiotic parameters were useful in differentiating on a larger scale, i.e. between sites. For all soil properties tested, the differences among the replicates were smaller than those between sites or among points indicating that, in the main experiment, all treatments can be sampled following the same pattern.Geostatistical analysis and fitting of an exponential model showed that a spatial structure exists in the biotic soil properties and that the samples are independent beyond separation distances of 25-30 cm. A revised sampling pattern consisting of 11 samples per lysimeter is described