Hindawi Publishing Corporation e Scientific World Journal Volume 2014, Article ID 535768, 11 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/535768 Research Article County-Scale Spatial Distribution of Soil Enzyme Activities and Enzyme Activity Indices in Agricultural Land: Implications for Soil Quality Assessment Xiangping Tan,1 Baoni Xie,1 Junxing Wang,1 Wenxiang He,1 Xudong Wang,1 andGehongWei2 1 College of Natural Resources and Environment, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi 712100, China 2 College of Life Science, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi 712100, China Correspondence should be addressed to Wenxiang He;
[email protected] Received 26 May 2014; Revised 25 July 2014; Accepted 15 August 2014; Published 31 December 2014 Academic Editor: Antonio Paz Gonzalez´ Copyright © 2014 Xiangping Tan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 2 Here the spatial distribution of soil enzymatic properties in agricultural land was evaluated on a county-wide (567 km )scalein Changwu, Shaanxi Province, China. The spatial variations in activities of five hydrolytic enzymes were examined using geostatistical methods. The relationships between soil enzyme activities and other soil properties were evaluated using both an integrated total enzyme activity index (TEI) and the geometric mean of enzyme activities (GME). At the county scale, soil invertase, phosphatase, and catalase activities were moderately spatially correlated, whereas urease and dehydrogenase activities were weakly spatially correlated. Correlation analysis showed that both TEI and GME were better correlated with selected soil physicochemical properties than single enzyme activities.