Evaluating Soil Carbon Changes in Paddy Field based on Different Fraction of Soil Organic Matter

Organic matter plays important roles in soil ecosystem in terms of carbon and nitrogen cycles. Due to recent concerns on climate change, carbon sequestration in agricultural land has become one of the most interesting and debating issues. It is necessary to understand behavior of soil carbon for evaluating decomposition or sequestration of organic matter and analyzing potential carbon decomposition pattern about the kinds of organic matter sources to cope with well. In order to evaluate decomposition of soil carbon according to organic material during cultivating rice in paddy field, we treated organic material such as hairy vetch, rice straw, oil cake fertilizer, and manure compost at 50 × 50 × 20 cm blocks made of wood board, and analyzed carbon contents of fulvic acid and humic acid fraction, and total carbon periodically in 2013 and 2014. Soil sampling was conducted on monthly basis. Four Kinds of organic matter were mixed with soil in treatment plots on 2 weeks before transplanting of rice. The treatment of animal compost showed the highest changes of total carbon, which showed 7.9 g kg -1 in May 2013 to 11.6 g kg -1 in October 2014. Fulvic acid fraction which is considered to easily decompose ranged from 1 to 2 g kg -1 . Humic acid fraction was changed between 1 to 3g kg -1 in all treatments until organic material had been applied in 2014. From May to August in the second year, the contents of humic acid fraction increased to about 4 g kg -1 . The average of humic fraction carbon at treatments of animal compost was recorded highest among treatments during two years, 2.1 g kg -1 . The treatment of animal compost has showed the lowest ratio of fulvic acid fraction, humic acid fraction compared with other treatments. The average ratio of fulvic fraction carbon in soil ranged from 16 to 20%, and humic fraction carbon ranged from 19 to 22%. In conclusion, animal compost including wood as bulking agent is superior in sequestrating carbon at agricultural land to other kinds of raw plant residue.