The study of the efficiency of multielement extractant solutions to assess the availability of soil nutrients for plants has increased recently. The use of these solutions increases the efficiency of soil analysis laboratories by simplifying analytical procedures. Furthermore, the determination of nutrients by Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) has increased in recent years, owing mainly to simpler test procedures and less limitations in the detection of elements. Aiming at evaluating methods of extraction and verifying their efficiency to assess Cu and Zn availability to plants, greenhouse and laboratory studies were conducted. In the greenhouse study, representative soil samples of the state of Rio Grande do Sul were accommodated in 11 dm³pots and cultivated with corn (Zea mays) plants for 45 d, and soon after with soybean (Glycine max) for another 45 d. The extraction methods for Zn and Cu were: HCl 0.1 mol L-1 (HCl), Mehlich-1 (M1) and Mehlich-3 (M3). The determination coefficients between the Cu amounts absorbed by plants and amounts extracted by the different methods were: HCl = 0.56**, M1 = 0.35*, M3 = 0.46** for corn plants and HCl = 0.66**, M1 = 0.43*, M3 = 0.93** for soybean. For the zinc amount taken up by plants and that extracted by various methods the determination coefficients were: HCl = 0.18*, M1 = 0.32**, M3 = 0.10* and HCl = 0.37*, M1 = 0.36**, M3 = 0.31*, for corn and soybean plants, respectively. The predictive capacity of the methods in assessing the availability of Cu and Zn for plants was low.
soil text; correlation; micronutrients
