ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Agron.
Sec. Plant-Soil Interactions
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fagro.2025.1610839
This article is part of the Research TopicPromoting the Use of Bio-fertilizers to Improve Soil HealthView all articles
Effects of human urine application on soil physicochemical properties, microbial communities, and enzymatic activities
Provisionally accepted
- 1Agro-Environmental Protection Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Tianjin, China
- 2Key Laboratory of Rural Toilet and Sewage Treatment Technology, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Tianjin, China
- 3Tianjin Municipal Engineering Design & Research Institute Co.,Ltd., Tianjin, China
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Abstract：Human urine (HU) is rich in nutrients necessary for plant growth, recycling HU as fertilizer has multiple positive impacts, such as enhancing agricultural sustainability, reducing wastewater pollution, and decreasing reliance on chemical fertilizers, so it is of great significance to explore the effects of urine agricultural utilization on soil environment. A pot experiment was conducted to evaluate the impacts of varying HU application rates (0 (Control, C), 13, 26, 52, and 104 mL•kg -1 ) on soil physicochemical properties, microbial communities, and enzymatic activities.The findings indicate that HU application enriched soil nutrients and significantly increased soil electrical conductivity, with levels at 104 mL•kg -1 reaching an increase of 840% over C. Compare to the C, HU enhanced the activities of soil enzymes such as invertase, urease, and catalase by 7.30%-58.75%, 0.93%-47.77%, and 1.56%-16.62% respectively, but reduced alkaline phosphatase activity by 6.40-64.76%. Additionally, increasing HU application was correlated with reductions in both operational taxonomic units and the Shannon-Weiner diversity index. The relative abundance of soil bacteria such as Pseudomonadota and Gemmatimonadota incrementally rose with higher HU input, whereas that of Bacillota declined. Moreover, the composition of the top 20 bacterial genera, including Gaiella (1.49%), Bacillus (1.47%) and Blastococcus (1.02%), was significantly altered by HU application. In conclusion, HU application changes the soil ecological environment, and to some extent modifies the structure and diversity of soil bacterial communities and enzymatic function. However, the absence of long-term field trials underlines the necessity for comprehensive evaluations of HU's impact on soil fertility and crop health, and careful attention must be paid to potential environmental safety risks post-HU application.
Keywords: Urine agricultural utilization, Soil nutrients, Soil ecological environment, bacterial community structure, Enzyme function
Received: 13 Apr 2025; Accepted: 26 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yu, Wang, Zheng, Yang, Zhang, Zhang and Wei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiaocheng Wei, Agro-Environmental Protection Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Tianjin, China
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