ABSTRACT

Land management practices provide the basis for evaluating sustainability and monitoring environmental impacts. The study was carried out at Michael Okpara University of agriculture, Umudike on the physical and chemical properties of soil under different land use. The selected land usc were forest land us, mixture cropping land use, pasture land us, mixed cropping land use pasture land use and industrial land use. In each land use, five sampling points A,B,C,D and E with an average distance of about 20m were sampled at 0-20cm depth using core and auger samplers. The parameters tested were bulk density, aggregate stability, saturated hydraulic conductivity, organic carbon, soil pl-1, available phosphorus, exchangeable acidity CEC, and particle size. The results shows that aggregate stability was significantly different at p

<0.1. The result further revealed that Ibrest and pasture land use significaitly retain more soil organic carbon 46% and 25% respectively compared to mixed crop land use and forest land use increased soil content by 29% within the pasture, soil pH was low in mixed and industrial samples. The low pH values may be attributed to heavy leaching due to a very high rainfall. The particle size analysis showed that the soil samples from the study sites were principally sandy, with sand accounting for more than 75% of the inorganic mineral fragment in the soil The soils of the study sites were acidic with a p11 of between 4.68 to 6.04 and the soil pH varied significantly under soils of different land use covers at p>