Dynamic surface soil components of land and vegetation types in Kebbi State Nigeria

Abstract

Land and vegetation are important components of soil and provides many benefits to surface soil including protection against erosion, climate change impact and unacceptable degradation of soil particles. Visual Soil Assessment was used as a mechanism to assess and classify the land and vegetation types of some agricultural sites in Kebbi State, Nigeria. The aim was to get better understanding of the environmental soil function for sustainable crop production in dryland and fadama areas of the State. The assessment was able to put together combinations of different vegetation types and land age classes. It is valued that the land age classes possessed the characteristics of Holocene-natural, Holocene-anthropogeomorphic, Holocene-young-natural, young-anthropogeomorphic, very-young anthropogeomorphic and very-young natural. However, the vegetation types could be related to evergreen forest, short medium forest (scattered clustered), dwarf vegetation (scattered isolated), grass vegetation, thick vegetation, stony-grass vegetation (scattered sparse) and short-length vegetation. The assessment provides an improve understanding of the current status of land and vegetation conditions of the study area and suggested regular soil management for sustainable crop production in the State.

Keywords

• Visual soil assessment, classification, land, vegetation

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