Data correlation structure controls pedotransfer function performance

摘要: Soil hydraulic properties are essential for modeling and evaluating several soil–water processes. The use of pedotransfer functions (PTFs) is a viable alternative in the analysis of these processes due to the high costs or difficulty in measuring these properties. We aimed to (1) examine the performance of a physically-based PTF and a pool of empirical PTFs from both temperate and tropical climates to estimate soil water retention under subtropical climate and (2) performed correlation analysis between PTF inputs, outputs and estimation residuals to help gain understanding why some PTFs are more successful than others in a given study area. The study was carried out in the Pelotas River Watershed, Southern Brazil, where samples were taken at 100 locations in the 0–0.20-m soil layer along a 25-km-spatial transect. For each point, clay, silt, fine sand, total sand, and organic carbon contents were measured along …