• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.38 no.12
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• pp.641-646
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• 2016

Soil organic matter (SOM) is an important soil component releasing nutrients to the plants and reducing risks of soil contamination to the human and ecosystem. Much attention has been recently paid to SOM investigation and management because SOM holds the most of carbon in the earth and sequestrate carbon as a sink tank. The first objective of the study was to investigate SOM of 495 soil samples taken at the Korea Soil Quality Monitoring Network. Soil samples were collected from 16 regions and 8 land use types. The second objective of the study was to find a relationship between the Tyurin method and loss-on-ignition (LOI) method for SOM. The means of SOM by Tyurin and LOI methods were 1.90 and 2.92 % (w/w), respectively. Land uses such as forest, religious area and park where organic matters continuously supply to normally showed higher SOMs than residential and school areas having sandy soils. A regression equation of the relationship between Tyurin and LOI methods was y(Tyurin) = 0.6257x(LOI) + 0.0602 (P-value < 0.001). The coefficient of determination was $R^2=0.749$, relatively linearly related. Although LOI may result in higher SOMs than the Tyurin method, LOI may be a preference for the SOM investigation if various kinds of land uses and many soil samples should be measured.