Phosphorus fate, behavior and bioavailability in long-term phosphate fertilizer and soil management trials in the Brazilian Cerrado

Phosphorus is essential for all organisms, the most limiting nutrient for plant growth in the tropics and with finite resources. In many tropical soils P is often present only in very low concentrations due to its strongly interaction with the soil’s mineral phase. Thus, P fertilization in these soils is mandatory for biomass production. However, the strong interaction of P with soil's mineral phase result in a very low P use efficiency by the plants. To improve the use efficiency of such resource understanding its fate and behavior in the plant-soil system is of pivotal importance to improve our sustainability. This works aims to evaluate the long-term changes on soil P fractions and fertilizer fate in conventional tillage and native soils in the tropical soils of Brazil. To unravel these changes we aim to combine sequential chemical fractionation techniques (Hedley`s procedure) with state-of-the-art methods used for P speciation, P K-edge XANES and 31P-NMR.