US EPA

2077445 

Journal Article 

How to quantify contamination of organic litter bag material with soil? 

Potthoff, M; Loftfield, N 

1998 

1 

Pedobiologia
ISSN: 0031-4056
EISSN: 1873-1511 

BIOSIS/98/21827 

42 

2 

147-153 

eng 

BIOSIS COPYRIGHT: BIOL ABS. The litter bag method is often used to study different aspects of decomposition of organic matter in soil or on the soil surface. Deposition of surrounding soil into the litter bags makes determination of decomposition rates of organic matter and its nutrients particularly difficult. This contamination has to be removed or determined for subsequent correction of measured results. A common method to quantify soil contamination of litter bag material is the determination of ash residues of organic matter, soil, and sample material. Later on, data like mass losses can be corrected for the contamination. For straw samples with predefined soil contaminations (10% to 60% soil in dry weight) we evaluated the effects of grinding and subsampling on the estimation of soil content, where ash residues are used as a marker to identify soil. The possibility of using element contents (SiO2, Al, Fe, and Pb) of litter bag material as internal standards to calculate soil contamination wa