Resumen:
Mexico is the world’s fourth most important maize
producer; hence, there is a need to maintain soil quality for
sustainable production in the upcoming years. Pumice mining
is a superficial operation that modifies large areas in central
Mexico. The main aim was to assess the present state
of agricultural soils differing in elapsed time since pumice
mining (0–15 years) in a representative area of the Calimaya
region in the State of Mexico. The study sites in 0, 1, 4, 10,
and 15 year old reclaimed soils were compared with an adjacent
undisturbed site. Our results indicate that gravimetric
moisture content, water hold capacity, bulk density, available
phosphorus, total nitrogen, soil organic carbon, microbial
biomass carbon and phosphatase and urease activity were
greatly impacted by disturbance. A general trend of recovery
towards the undisturbed condition with reclamation age
was found after disturbance, the recovery of soil total N being
faster than soil organic C. The soil quality indicators were
selected using principal component analysis (PCA), correlations
and multiple linear regressions. The first three components
gathered explain 76.4% of the total variability. The obtained
results revealed that the most appropriate indicators to
diagnose the quality of the soils were urease, available phosphorus
and bulk density and minor total nitrogen. According
to linear score analysis and the additive index, the soils
showed a recuperation starting from 4 years of pumice extraction.
