The physical fractionation of soil organic matter (SOM) is an alternative in assessing the amount of labile fraction that is used to calculate the carbon management index (CMI). The objective this research was to assess the efficiency of particle-size physical fractionation, (53-µm mesh), and density physical fractionation, with sodium iodide 1.8Mg m-3 (NaI) or sodium polytungstate 2.0Mg m-3 (PTS) solutions, at recovering SOM labile fractions (particulate and light, respectively) and at estimating the CMI. Soil samples of the 0-20cm layer of a sandy clay loam Acrisol under conventional tillage (CT) and no-tillage (NT) combined with two cropping systems (oat/maize and oat+vetch/maize+cowpea) were analyzed for stocks of total organic carbon (TOC), particulate organic carbon fraction (POC) and light fraction carbon (LF-C). In density physical fractionation, with the use of NaI was recovered less LF-C than PTS. The recovery of POC by particle-size fractionation was intermediate between the recovery of NaI-LF and PTS-LF. The CMI calculated after particle-size fractionation showed high correlation with CMI after density fractionation with NaI or PTS, although results were rather underestimated with NaI. Conservation management systems without soil disturbance and with higher crop residue addition enhanced the CMI, because of increments of both lability index and carbon pool index. The CMI based on SOM physical densimetrical fraction shows evidence of being and efficient index to discriminate management systems that can be used to assess soil management practices.
light fraction; sodium iodide; sodium polytungstate; no-tillage
