Transformation of soil texture schemes and determination of water-physical properties of soils

Abstract

Measuring soil water-physical properties is laborious, time-consuming, and expensive. That provokes a lot of scientists to estimate them which action is troubled by the usage of different soil texture classification systems. The study proposes a rapid, reliable, and universally applicable methodology for soil textural transformations between different classification systems. The method of discrete mathematics is applied to make the conversion of particle-size classes from the Kachinsky system, which is used in Bulgaria to the International systems. Three different data sources were used to determine the water-physical properties of soils from textural data - 376 soil profiles from Bulgaria, extraction from the SoilGrids system for the Plovdiv district in Bulgaria and data from CanSIS/NSDB database. The relationship between the dependent variables field capacity (FC), wilting point (WP) and bulk density (BD), and independent variables sand, silt, and clay soil content was sought in the form of a regression equation. The applied stepwise regression procedure produces a close dependence between the soil texture and its water-physical properties.

Keywords

• Bulk density
• discrete mathematics
• field capacity
• soil texture
• wilting point

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