Physical Soil Disturbance Effects On Soil pH In The Greater Vancouver Area

Abstract

As human settlement is expanding, and agricultural practices are becoming increasingly detrimental to the soil to cope with the increasing demand of food, it’s important to understand the impact of physical disturbance on soil. Soil pH level varies across a landscape and is dependent on microbial and fungal content, as well as the type of disturbance it experiences. This study investigates the relationship between soil pH level and its physical disturbance, and hypothesizes an increase in soil acidification as soil disturbance increases. Across the Greater Vancouver Area, Canada, 48 soil samples were obtained from four different classes of soil disturbance, whereby the pH of each soil sample was recorded with chemical pH test kits. Following this, a one-way ANOVA test was carried out to assess the means between different soil classes, resulting in a p value of 0.054. As a consequence, it was concluded that the means were not statistically significant, thus failing to reject the null hypothesis. However, as the pvalue indicated that the means were not statistically different, it was concluded that the experiment needs to be replicated with a larger sample size to obtain a clearer interpretation of the results.