Which of the land uses among forest, meadow, agriculture or agroforestry is the best one for soil quality and how can we decide to choose the one among them?
It is difficult to tell which one is the best based on the broad classification you gave. The soil quality differs among different types of forests, meadows, agricultural practices or agroforestry. The soil quality also depends on the management of a given land use. In general agriculture can have lower soil quality than the others. Otherwise, without knowing the type and management of the other three land uses, it would be very difficult to make a guess. For better answer try to search for research outputs from your country.
Thats really a difficult question, but worth practical. Unless you have crop specific soil quality data or crop specific soil suitability criteria, suggesting a suitable land use based soil properties would be a stupendous task. ..
An interesting study..
A soil quality assessment under different land use types in Keriya river basin, Southern Xinjiang, China( Soil and Tillage Research,Volume 146, Part B, March 2015, Pages 223-229 )
Abstract: The process of oasisization leads to the transformation of natural land use to farmlands in the Keriya river basin. In order to investigate changes in soil quality during the process of oasisization, we established five experimental fields in the oasis-desert ecotone of the Keriya river basin, including farmlands(FL) and four typical natural lands natural forest (NF), saline and alkaline land (SAL), desert (D) and sand land (SL)) of the main local land cover. In this paper, a minimum data set of soil indicators was selected including soil water content indicator, pH, soil nutrient indicators and soil salinity indicators, with 100 soil samples collected within five land use types. Observations found significant differences in the fifteen soil indicators. These were used to calculate a soil quality index (SQI) and assessed using multivariate analyses (cluster analysis and principal component analysis, PCA) in order to determine the soil quality of the different land uses. Data indicated a clear difference in soil quality among the studied areas: low soil quality (SQI
It depends not only soil nutrients but also climatic conditions also....
Dear Mohit Husain, thank you for your answer. Can you please assume that all land use cover types are possible in that given area but you want to save the soil for the most sustainable land use. So, in that case, which land use cover would you choose?
A generally agreed standard is 1/3rd of the land being under non-agriculture use, most ideally as forest.
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