Soil Quality Assessment Strategies for Evaluating Soil Degradation in Northern Ethiopia

Table 6

Soil quality indices developed using an EO selected dataset to compare eight LUSMS in the Mai-Negus catchment of northern Ethiopia.

LUSMS	Unscreened SQI					PCA-SQI
	LSF^a			NLSF^a		LSF			NLSF		Mean^b
	I^L	II^L	III^L	I^N	II^N	I^L	II^L	III^L	I^N	II^N
LS1	0.937^a	0.943^a	0.925^a	0.966^a	0.964^a	0.796^a	0.799^a	0.779^a	0.818^a	0.816^a	0.874^a
LS2	0.828^b	0.831^b	0.786^b	0.920^a	0.918^a	0.724^b	0.723^b	0.690^b	0.783^a	0.781^a	0.799^b
LS3	0.707^c	0.720^c	0.673^c	0.830^b	0.828^b	0.612^c	0.622^c	0.584^c	0.708^b	0.666^b	0.695^c
LS4	0.652^c	0.662^c	0.610^c	0.775^b	0.773^b	0.556^d	0.565^d	0.522^d	0.651^c	0.650^b	0.642^d
LS5	0.529^d	0.552^d	0.491^d	0.658^c	0.656^c	0.448^e	0.468^e	0.417^e	0.548^d	0.546^c	0.531^e
LS6	0.501^d	0.526^d	0.461^d	0.621^c	0.619^c	0.428^e	0.450^e	0.397^e	0.497^e	0.517^c	0.502^e
LS7	0.657^c	0.670^c	0.622^c	0.773^b	0.771^c	0.545^d	0.558^d	0.514^d	0.653^c	0.651^b	0.641^d
LS8	0.397^e	0.434^e	0.361^e	0.511^d	0.509^d	0.335^f	0.369^f	0.307^f	0.420^f	0.418^d	0.406^f
mean	0.651	0.667	0.616	0.756	0.754	0.556	0.569	0.526	0.635	0.631	0.636
LSD (𝑃=0.05)	0.066	0.059	0.067	0.060	0.060	0.044	0.038	0.042	0.042	0.051	0.048

Means followed by different letters in the same rows are significantly different at 𝑃=0.05; LSD: least significance difference.
aDetails of LSF and NLSF description can be found in Section 2.4 (Step 2).
bThis shows the overall mean of the different scoring and indexing methods across the columns for the same LUSMS tested statistically.
Explanations of abbreviations are similar to footnotes under Table 5.