Capillary electrophoresis characterisation of humic acids: application to diverse forest soil samples
Michael Tatzber A C , Franz Mutsch B , Axel Mentler A , Ernst Leitgeb B , Michael Englisch B and Martin H. Gerzabek A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Institute of Soil Research, Department of Forest and Soil Sciences, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Peter Jordan Strasse 82, A-1190 Vienna, Austria.
B Federal Research and Training Centre for Forests, Natural Hazards and Landscape, Seckendorff-Gudent-Weg 8, A-1131 Vienna, Austria.
C Corresponding author. Email: michael.tatzber@boku.ac.at
Environmental Chemistry 8(6) 589-601 https://doi.org/10.1071/EN11054
Submitted: 22 April 2011 Accepted: 27 September 2011 Published: 23 November 2011
Environmental context. Analysis of soil organic matter is important for understanding turnover and stabilisation processes of organic carbon in soils. Capillary electrophoresis is used here to investigate humic acids from soils of diverse forest sites, and show that the patterns of signals are indicative of soil characteristics. The method provides useful information of soil types and complements the existing set of methods for humic acid characterisation.
Abstract. Analyses of humic substances provide very useful information about turnover characteristics and stabilisation processes of soil organic matter in environmental soil samples. The present study investigates 113 samples of forest soils from three different layers (undecomposed litter (L), if present, mixed samples of F (intermediate decomposed) and H (highly decomposed) organic matter (FH) and upper mineral soil layers (Ah horizon) from 0 to 5 cm) by extracting humic acids (HAs) and recording electropherograms. Five signals of these electropherograms were evaluated and correlated with basic parameters from soil (organic carbon, Corg, and total nitrogen, Nt, and extraction yields of HAs) and HAs (total carbon, Ct, and Nt), and with signals from photometry, mid-infrared and fluorescence spectroscopy. The developed method was able to separate HAs from different soil layers by calculating a discriminant function based on the five evaluated electrophoretic signals. The dataset of this work opened the opportunity to correlate the observed electrophoretic signals with the other determined soil parameters and spectroscopic signals. This can be seen as a very important step in the direction to assignments of the obtained electrophoretic signals. Soil characteristics were reflected quite well by this method and, combined with the other approaches, it is suitable for applications in further studies.
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