Evaluation of the usability of single extractors in chemical analysis of composts using principal component analysis

The usability of various single extractors in the chemical analysis of composts was evaluated using principal component analysis. Ten different single extractors were used to determine the contents of microelements obtained in the chemical extraction of four different composts. It was found that principal component analysis is a satisfactory statistical method enabling the comparison of different solutions in terms of efficiency of extraction of microelements from composts of different composition. The results showed that 1mol dm^-3 HCL and 10% HNO₃ solutions had the highest extraction strength, and 0.01mol dm^-3 CaCl₂ and 1mol dm^-3 NH₄NO₃ the lowest.