Cropping system is a key determinant of soil health after accounting for environmental and edaphic variability

作者：Franky Celestin, Gabriel Maltais‐Landry, José Carlos Batista Dubeux, Rao Mylavarapu, Lin Yang · 发表于：Geoderma · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1016/j.geoderma.2025.117330 · 被引用次数：8 · 研究领域：Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics、Crop Yield and Soil Fertility、Soil and Water Nutrient Dynamics

• Propensity score weighting revealed actual impacts of cropping system on soil health. • Grazed pastures had higher organic matter and carbon indicators than row crops. • Soil pH and PSR were elevated in row crop systems. • Cropping system consistently affected carbon-based indicators. • The relative importance of environmental and edaphic variables was indicator-specific. Soil health assessment is critical for understanding and promoting sustainable soil management practices. Soil health assessment methods incorporate a variety of inherent environmental and edaphic properties, including climate variables and texture, as well as cropping system. However, these inherent properties often vary systematically among cropping systems and potentially confound the effects of cropping system on soil health. Using a new soil health dataset in Florida, we adopted propensity score weighting to model each sample’s probability of belonging to a particular cropping system based on soil drainage class, clay content, mean annual temperature (MAT), and mean annual precipitation (MAP). By balancing these factors across systems, this method enabled unbiased estimation of cropping system effects. The effects of cropping system on soil health indicators remained statistically meaningful after propensity score weighting using the same significance threshold ( α = 0.05). Soil organic matter and carbon-related indicators were consistently higher in grazed pastures than in row crop systems, indicatin...