The Changes in Chemical and Physical Properties of Fibric Peat Pollowing Burning

Abstract

Fire is still used until today for land preparation because it is cheap, easy and relatively quick to be done, meanwhile the impact is still not much yet known especially for peat land Due to that reason the research especially on peat qlllJlily following burning is highly important in order to understand the performance of it in the term of sustainabilily. The research objective was to understand the performance of burned peat quality compared to the condition before burning atfibric peat especially in the land preparation area using fire belong to the shifting cultivator. The site was located in the Pelalawan district, Riau province, Indonesia, during the dry season in the year 2001. To reach the research objective 2 plots of each 400 m) (20 m x 20 m) were established The results of the research shown that soon following burning, chemical properties of burned peat was increased significantly, while after one month part of them tended to decrease such as P, K, and base saturation. Three months after burning most of the chemical properties decreased while at six month a few of them was still increased such as P, Na and CEC. This research shown that the increasing of ash afterburning was a temporary effect and others negative impact is continued.