- Title
- The use of a rapid incineration field test for determining soil organic carbon in the Southern Cape Region
- Creator
- Ackhurst, Albert Arthur
- Subject
- Port Elizabeth (South Africa)
- Subject
- Eastern Cape (South Africa)
- Subject
- South Africa
- Date Issued
- 2014-12
- Date
- 2014-12
- Type
- Master's theses
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10948/53336
- Identifier
- vital:45135
- Description
- Knowledge of soil organic carbon levels is important both for agricultural effectiveness and soil carbon sequestration accounting, especially against the backdrop of increased climate change impacts and pressure on food production landscapes. However, current methods for soil carbon determination are expensive, energy intensive, time consuming and potentially hazardous leading to a call for alternative methods, which should be cheap, fast, simple, accurate, safe and usable where resources and soil analysis laboratories are limited. To this end the student invented a novel rapid incineration field test (RIFT) for determining soil organic carbon and tested its validity in this study. This method incorporates principles found in dry combustion as well as loss-on-ignition and quantifying organic carbon through gravimetric analysis. In order to illustrate effectiveness and accuracy it was necessary to correlate RIFT with a reference method, in this instance dry combustion with a Leco device as well as another commonly used indirect method namely the Walkley-Black wet chemical oxidation method. Samples from eleven soil forms were collected from the Southern Cape region and they were subjected to the three testing methods. It was found that RIFT is indeed as effective and in 72% of the soil forms even more effective than Walkley-Black. Furthermore, it was ascertained whether the accuracy of RIFT can be improved by correcting for clay content. The correlation of RIFT with clay % was not very significant and clay % as a variable was therefore not used in this study to obtain further refinement of RIFT predictions. Another finding was also that RIFT illustrated less variability than both the Leco and Walkley-Black methods. Lastly it was ascertained that the RIFT device and methodology is indeed cost effective, energy efficient, fast and safe in terms of the need to use potentially hazardous chemicals.
- Description
- Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Science, School of Natural Resource Management, 2021
- Format
- computer
- Format
- online resource
- Format
- application/pdf
- Format
- 1 online resource (83 pages)
- Format
- Publisher
- Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Science
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University
- Rights
- All Rights Reserved
- Rights
- Open Access
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | Albert Ackhurst.pdf | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |