TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hartmann, Lena
A1  - Gabriel, Marvin
A1  - Zhou, Yuanrong
A1  - Sponholz, Barbara
A1  - Thiemeyer, Heinrich
T1  - Soil assessment along toposequences in rural northern Nigeria : a geomedical approach
T2  - Applied and environmental soil science
N2  - Case numbers of endemic Ca-deficiency rickets (CDR) have been reported to be alarmingly rising among children of subsistence farms in developing countries within the last 30 years. Fluoride toxicities in the environment are known to not be related to the disease. To investigate if, instead, CDR is caused by a nutrient deficiency in the environment, subsistence farms in an endemic CDR area near Kaduna, northern Nigeria, were investigated for bedrock, slope forms, soil types, and soil characteristics. The natural environment was investigated according to the World Reference Base, soil texture was analysed by pipette and sieving, and plant-available macronutrients were determined using barium-chloride or Ca-acetate-lactate extraction. The analyses showed that granite and slope deposits were the dominant parent materials. The typical slope forms and soil types were Lixisols and Acrisols on pediments, Fluvisols in river valleys, and Plinthosols and Acrisols on plains. Compared with West African background values, all of the soils had normal soil textures but were low in macronutrients. Comparisons to critical limits, however, showed that only the P concentrations were critically low, which are typical for savanna soils. A link between nutrient deficiency in soils and CDR in the Kaduna area was therefore considered unlikely.
Y1  - 2004
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/50515
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-505159
SN  - 1687-7675
SN  - 1687-7667
N1  - Copyright © 2014 Lena Hartmann et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 6
IS  - Art. 628024
SP  - 1
EP  - 9
PB  - Hindawi Publ. Corp.
CY  - New York, NY [u. a.]
ER  -