Journal Article

Terrain Effects on the Spatial Variability of Soil Physical and Chemical Properties

Demissie, Solomon S., Ayele, Gebiaw T., Jeong, Jaehak, Jemberrie, Mengistu A., Hamilton, David P.

2020

Overview

Understanding topography effects on soil properties is vital to modelling landscape hydrology and establishing sustainable on-field management practices. This research focuses on an arable area (117 km2) in Southwestern Ethiopia where agricultural fields and bush cover are the dominant land uses. We postulate that adapting either of the soil data resources, coarse resolution FAO-UNESCO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) soil data or pedo-transfer functions (PTFs) is not reliable to indicate future watershed management directions. The FAO-UNESCO data does not account for scale issues and assigns the same soil property at different landscape gradients. The PTFs, on the other hand, do not account for environmental effects and fail to provide all the required data. In this regard, mapping soil property spatial dynamics can help understand landscape physicochemical processes and corresponding land use changes. For this purpose, soil samples were collected across the watershed following a gridded sampling scheme. In areas with heterogeneous topography, soil is spatially variable as influenced by land use and slope. To understand the spatial variation, this research develops indicators, such as topographic index, soil topographic wetness index, elevation, aspect, and slope. Pearson correlation (r), among others, was used to investigate terrain effects on selected soil properties: organic matter (OM), available water content (AWC), sand content (%), clay content (%), silt content (%), electrical conductivity (EC), moist bulk density (MBD), and saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ksat). The results show that there were statistically significant correlations between elevation-based variables and soil physical properties. Among the variables considered, the ‘r’ value between topographic index and soil attributes (i.e., OM, EC, AWC, sand, clay, silt, and Ksat) were 0.66, 0.5, 0.7, 0.55, 0.62, 0.4, and 0.66, respectively. In conclusion, while understanding topography effects on soil properties is vital, implementing either FAO-UNESCO or PTFs soil data do not provide appropriate information pertaining to scale issues.