Effects of grassland management practices on soil organic carbon: An analysis with three objective weighting methods

Nearly 90% of carbon in grassland ecosystem is stored in soil, and grassland management can affect the soil organic carbon content through affecting the vegetation and the soil physical and chemical properties. To comprehensively analyze and evaluate the effects of grassland management practices on the soil organic carbon would have significance in establishing the sustainable management mode of grassland soil carbon sink. In this study, three objective weighting methods including entropy, weighting method, standard deviation method, and CRITIC were adopted to analyze the effects of burning, mowing, and fertilization on grassland soil organic carbon, and the scoring and ordering of the management practices and their combinations were made. All the three objective weighting methods were available to the analysis of the effects of grassland management practices on soil organic carbon, and the results obtained were similar. Among the parameters analyzed, >0. 25 mm soil aggregate had the greatest weighing value. Mowing combined with 1/2 organic and 1/2 chemical fertilizations obtained the highest score, while burning with no fertilization had the lowest one. Both burning and mowing decreased the soil organic carbon markedly, with more impacts under burning. Burning and mowing combined with fertilization could effectively maintain the soil organic carbon content, with the best effect for the treatments with 1/2 organic and 1/2 chemical fertilizer