Texture and sesquioxide effects on water-stable aggregates and organic matter in some tropical soils

Many tropical soils include sesquioxides, which influence the stability of soil organic matter (OM) and aggregation to an extent that is not fully characterized. The present study was carried out on a range of 18 topsoil samples (0–10 cm) from low-activity clay (LAC) soils from sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil, and aimed: (i) at characterizing the size distributions of water-stable aggregates and organic constituents, (ii) at studying how these distributions were affected by texture and sesquioxides, and (iii) how they interacted. The distributions of stable aggregates were generally dominated by macroaggregates (> 200 μm), and those of organic constituents by fine OM ( 200 and 20–200 μm, respectively), but each of them correlated more closely with oxalate-extracted Al. These results suggested that for the LAC tropical soils under study OM and aggregate stability depended closely on Al-containing sesquioxides, on Al-substituted crystalline hematite and goethite especially. These sesquioxides also seemed to play a dominant role in the relations between aggregation and OM. As far as soils rich in sesquioxides are concerned, this confirmed that OM is not the main aggregating agent, and suggested that physical protection within aggregates is not necessarily the main mechanism for OM stabilization. However, as soil sesquioxide content cannot be managed easily, the effect of land use on soil OM and aggregation was determinant at the local scale: indeed, for a given location, stable macroaggregation, Ct and C amount as fine OM generally decreased with land use intensification (i.e. cultivation, tillage, reduced surface cover).