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.