Measuring Disturbance Impact on Soil Hydraulic Properties

Abstract:

Disturbances associated with land cover change such as forest clearing and mono-cropping can have a substantial impact on soil-hydraulic properties, which in turn have a cascading impact on surface and near-surface hydrologic response. Although disturbances and vegetation change can alter soil-water retention and conductivity relations, hydrologic models relying on traditional soil-texture based pedotransfer functions would not be able to capture the disturbance impact on infiltration and soil-moisture storage. Therefore, in-situ estimates of characteristic curves of soil water retention and hydraulic conductivity relations are needed to understand and predict hydrologic impacts of land cover change. We present a method for in-situ estimates of effective characteristic curves that capture hysteretic soil-water retention properties at the plot scale. We apply this method to two different forest treatments and in urban settings to investigate the impact of land-use disturbances on soil-hydraulic properties. We compare our in-situ estimation method to results for simple pedotransfer functions to illustrate how this approach can improve understanding of disturbance impacts on hydrologic processes and function.