Soil water repellency under dry and wet antecedent weather conditions for selected land-cover types in the coastal zone of central Portugal
J. J. Keizer A B , C. O. A. Coelho A , M. J. S. Matias A , C. S. P. Domingues A and A. J. D. Ferreira AA Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies (CESAM), Department of Environment and Planning, University of Aveiro, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal.
B Corresponding author. Email: jkeiset@dao.ua.pt
Australian Journal of Soil Research 43(3) 297-308 https://doi.org/10.1071/SR04095
Submitted: 25 June 2004 Accepted: 24 December 2004 Published: 25 May 2005
Abstract
This paper reports on the first systematic inventory of soil water repellency in Portuguese coastal dune sand areas. Since water repellency is widely associated with certain vegetation types or individual plant species, this inventory concerned arable land as well as 6 natural and semi-natural land-cover types representative for the vegetation zonation in the study area. Since water repellency further is a feature that commonly varies through time, disappearing when soils become wet, initial sampling was carried out during late summer 2000 and later repeated, at 1 of the 2 sites per land-cover type, during early spring 2001. Water repellency was principally measured in the field using the Molarity of an Ethanol Droplet (MED) test.
Under the dry summer conditions, water repellency was a widespread phenomenon at and immediately below, the soil surface and numerous significant differences in ethanol classes existed between the land-cover types. The transient nature of water repellency was confirmed by many instances of significantly lower spring than summer ethanol classes. These significant differences were in general accompanied by a significant negative correlation of the summer and spring ethanol classes with volumetric soil moisture content. The sites’ overall repellency levels under dry antecedent weather conditions were significantly correlated with their overall levels of soil organic matter.
Additional keywords: dune sands, hydrophobicity, MED test, WDPT test, soil moisture.
Acknowledgments
This work was carried out with the support of the European Commission, under contract FAIR6-CT98-4027, but does not necessarily reflect the Commission’s view and in no way anticipated its future policy in this area. The Research Institute of the University of Aveiro is gratefully acknowledged as well for the research grant attributed to the first author. The Departments of Geo-Sciences and Physics of the University of Aveiro are thanked for the help with some laboratory analyses and for the rainfall data of the campus climate station, respectively. The comments of the 2 anonymous reviewers were very helpful for improving this manuscript.
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1 Actual repellency refers to field-moist soil as opposed to potential repellency, which is measured on laboratory-dried soil samples like in the case of the referred inventory by Dekker et al. (2000).
