On the spatial variability of soil hydraulic properties in a Holocene coastal farmland

摘要: Abstract Understanding water movement in the vadose zone is critical for accurate climate and crop modeling, precision agriculture, soil–atmosphere gas exchanges, contamination mitigation. A major reason difficulty of performing effective hydraulic measurements because they are scale dependent due to inherent heterogeneity soil. better understanding spatial variability underlying processes responsible this could lead a more modeling. The goal study investigate dependencies soil properties. Factorial kriging analysis (FKA) geostatistical technique which identifies relationships common sources variability. FKA was applied on number properties acquired from samples collected at 4 depths ranging 8 68 cm 20.8 ha field Po River delta. farmland characterized by presence paleo-channel structures highly heterogeneous Texture, bulk density, K s (saturated conductivity), van Genuchten–Mualem parameters α (inverse air entry), n (shape parameter), θ r (residual content), content) were included analysis. Two nested spherical models with ranges around 105 m 235 m plus nugget fit experimental variograms cross-variograms best. Regionalized correlation coefficients regionalized PCA revealed many strong, not obvious descriptive statistics, such as effect interaction between texture density , stronger influence than . first principal components (PCs) explained majority second PCs rarely informative. distributions resembled short paleo-channels long scale. decoupling likely caused differences structure. greater near surface but becomes less important depth increases. This suggests that plays an role should be considered often