Assessing Soil Acidification of Croplands in the Poyang Lake Basin of China from 2012 to 2018

Soil acidification, caused by intensified fertilizer application and acid deposition, has threatened the sustainability of agricultural ecosystems and soil quality in parts of China since the 1980s. However, little is known about the spatio-temporal change of soil pH in cropland at a large basin scale. Poyang Lake Basin of China was selected as the study area to identify the spatio-temporal change of cropland pH and detect potential soil acidification factors. A total of 507 and 503 topsoil samples were collected in 2012 and 2018, respectively, and methods including one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), Pearson’s correlation analyses, and Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) were applied. Results showed that soil pH ranged from 3.96 to 7.95 in 2012 and from 3.34 to 8.19 in 2018, with most samples being acidic (pH < 7) in both sets of data. The two soil datasets showed a significant decline (p < 0.05) of 0.1 pH units over the past six years and several soil samples that exhibited obvious uptrends in the groups of pH < 4.5 and 4.5–5.0 from 2012 to 2018. Overall, the distribution patterns of pH at the two sampling dates were similar, whereas local details of the pH spatial distribution patterns differed. While we found a significant correlation (p < 0.05) between soil pH and aspect, elevation and slope showed no significant correlation with pH. ANOVA showed that pH values in the water density (river or lake network density) range of 6.27–19.94 were significantly higher (p < 0.05) than the other water densities. Large amounts of precipitation with low pH values were found to significantly influence soil pH, whereas N-fertilizer inputs exerted limited effects on soil pH over the entire study area. These findings provided new insights on soil acidification assessment and potential factor detection at the basin scale.