Author(s):

RK Naresh, Purushottam, Sunil Kumar, Meenakshi Malik, Sudhir Kumar and Udita Choudhary

Abstract: Conservation management approaches focusing on minimizing soil disturbance maximizing soil cover, and stimulating biological activity can be achieved with different cropping choices and production goals in different environments all around the Indo-Gangetic Plains of North West, India. Therefore, review was presented in this paper to investigate the interactive effects of tillage; residue and nutrient management on top soil carbon stocks and soil labile organic carbon fractions. The proportion of SMBC as mineralizable C decreased with depth. Mean values across soil depths and nutrient supply options, the abundance of these four OOC fractions was in the order C_NL (7.04gkg^–1) >C_L (2.02gkg^–1) >C_VL (1.35gkg^–1) >C_LL (0.75gkg^–1). The zero tillage practice in wheat increased the organic carbon content and carbon stock as compared to conventional tillage in soils. The zero tillage increased dissolved organic carbon, microbial biomass carbon light and heavy fractions of carbon in soils at upper layers of the depths. The light and heavy fraction carbon values were observed to be lower in lighter textured soil which increased with increase in fineness of the texture. Soil organic C (SOC) was highly affected by tillage, cropping sequence, and N fertilization. The SOC stock varied under different treatments from 26.9 to 30.8, 17.7 to 21.2, 15.7 to 23.3 and 7.21 to 9.82 Mg ha^-1 at 0-15, 15-30, 30-45 and 45-60 cm soil depth. The topsoil (0–20 cm) had the maximum levels of cumulative SOC storage in the 1 m soil depth for the CK, N, NP, FYM, NP+S and NP+FYM treatments, accounting for 24%, 23%, 27%, 30%, 31% and 31%, respectively. At the 20–40 cm and 40–60 cm soil layers, the SOC stocks of the NP, FYM, NP+S and NP+FYM treatments were significantly higher by 17%, 21%, 25% and 37% and 5.3%, 8.1%, 7.3% and 11%, respectively, than that of the CK. The SOC stock decreased markedly with increasing soil profile depth irrespective of treatments.

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