ArticleHeliyon2025
Impact of Land use on soil quality: Insights from the forest-savannah transition zone of Ghana.
Article in Heliyon, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
Land use changes have a profound impact on soil fertility and agricultural production systems in the Forest-Savannah Transition Zone (FSTZ) of Ghana. Soil erosion and shortened fallow periods exacerbate soil fertility loss, further degrading soil quality. This study aimed to: (i) quantify soil quality indices, and (ii) assess soil fertility status across different land use types (Forest, Savannah Woodland, Grassland, Fallow, and Cropland) at two soil depths (0-20 cm and 20-50 cm). The 0-20 cm depth represents the plough layer, while 20-50 cm captures nutrient leaching in the Nkoranza districts. Using principal component analysis (PCA), we reduced the number of indicators from 29 to 9, capturing 94.42 % and 94.81 % of variability in the topsoil and subsoil, respectively. Key indicators included sand, silt, gravel content (Gco), electrical conductivity (EC), available phosphorus (Av. P), exchangeable potassium (Ex. K), microbial biomass carbon (MBC), nitrogen (MBN), and phosphorus (MBP). Results indicated that subsoil had a higher Soil Quality Index (SQI) (0.60) than topsoil (0.57), reflecting surface soil degradation. Forests recorded the highest SQI (0.67), while Croplands had the lowest (0.54). Communality estimates revealed that sand, silt, Gco, EC, Av. K, Av. P, MBC, and MBN were the most influential indicators, with the highest weights (0.11) at both depths. The SQI was positively correlated with maize yield (R
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