Characterizing selected soil attributes of different land-use management to assess reforestation benefits of deforested riparian buffers

Ecological Processes

Table 3 The summary for the simple linear correlation analysis performed between the mean soil attribute content in a given profile section and the corresponding profile depth to determine whether the distributions are impacted by land-use practices

Land-use	Intercept	Slope	Correlation coefficient
Correlation between organic carbon content and the profile depth
3 yr-cropland	40.1	− 84.6 (4.2) d	0.93
3 yr-bare riparian	26.1	− 34.0 (3.1) d	0.86
3 yr-reforested riparian	29.7	− 56.2 (4.7) d	0.87
6 yr-cropland	40.8	− 65.1 (4.2) d	0.78
6 yr-bare riparian	26.8	− 46.9 (2.5) d	0.92
6 yr-reforested riparian	40.4	− 72.2 (8.8) d	0.72
Correlation between mineral nitrogen content and profile depth
3 yr-cropland	3.79	− 7.97 (0.46) d	0.91
3 yr-bare riparian	2.06	− 3.92 (0.28) d	0.91
3 yr-reforested riparian	2.62	− 4.56 (0.55) d	0.73
6 yr-cropland	3.61	− 6.09 (0.37) d	0.90
6 yr-bare riparian	2.46	− 4.87 (0.20) d	0.95
6 yr-reforested riparian	3.07	− 6.39 (0.23) d	0.96
Correlation between electrical conductivity and profile depth
3 yr-cropland	0.209	− 0.458 (0.03) d	0.88
6 yr-cropland	0.200	− 0.359 (0.03) d	0.81

The correlations are significant at P < 0.05. They were carried out using the means listed in Table 2. The correlation for the two 3-year-old reforested riparian (RR) land-use is abbreviated as 3 yr-reforested riparian, the corresponding cropland as 3 yr-cropland (CP), and the bare riparian as 3 yr-bare riparian (BR) in this table. Similar abbreviations are used for the 6-year-old RR and the corresponding CP and BR land-use practices