Deep drainage (DD) is recognised as one of the main drivers for dryland and irrigated salinity. Review of the literature on risk and hazard highlights few Australian studies on assessing DD risk and the need to develop new methods for determining DD risk. This study developed a method to map DD risk for the Northern Murray Darling Basin Catchment of the Border Rivers. Deep drainage was predicte...

While inverse parameter estimation techniques for determining key parameters affecting water flow and solute transport are becoming increasingly common in saturated and unsaturated zone studies, their application to practical problems, such as irrigation, have received relatively little attention. In this article, we used the Levenberg–Marquardt optimization algorithm in combination with the HY...

A range of continental-scale soil datasets exists in Europe with different spatial representation and based on different principles. We developed comprehensive pedotransfer functions (PTFs) for applications principally on spatial datasets with continental coverage. The PTF development included the prediction of soil water retention at various matric potentials and prediction of parameters to ch...

A key parameter used in wetland hydrological and landform development models is hydraulic conductivity. Head recovery tests are often used to measure hydraulic conductivity, but the calculation techniques are usually confined to rigid soil theory. This is despite reports demonstrating the misapplication of rigid soil theory to non-rigid soils such as peats. Although values of hydraulic conducti...

Plant water loss, regulated by stomata and driven by atmospheric demand, cannot exceed the maximum steady-state supply through roots. Just as an electric circuit breaks when carrying excess current, the soil-plant continuum breaks if forced to transport water beyond its capacity. Exciting new molecular, biophysical and ecological research suggests that roots are the weakest link along this hydr...

Due in part to recent progress in root genetics and genomics, increasing attention is being devoted to root system architecture (RSA) for the improvement of drought tolerance. The focus is generally set on deep roots, expected to improve access to soil water resources during water deficit episodes. Surprisingly, our quantitative understanding of the role of RSA in the uptake of soil water remai...

abstract spatial variability of soils makes difficult analysis of soil water flow phenomena especially in a large area such as a watershed. using scaling methods is a solution in variability problems. the objective of this study was to investigate the effect of the non-linear variability on performance of the scaling methods of richards’ equation for modeling infiltration in a watershed. the me...

Downward redistribution of soil water through plant roots has important consequences for water and nutrient balance of arid and semi-arid ecosystems. Nevertheless, information on the seasonal patterns and magnitudes of redistribution is lacking for all but a few plant species. We measured sap flow in the taproot and three main lateral roots of a 10-year-old Juglans major Torr. tree, on an ephem...

Soil infiltration processes manage runoff generation, which in turn affects soil erosion. There is limited information on infiltration rates. In this study, the impact of vine age on soil bulk density (BD) and hydraulic conductivity (Ks) was assessed on a loam soil tilled by chisel plough. Soil sampling was conducted in the inter row area of six vineyards, which differed by the age from plantin...

Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) are physical–mathematical models which allow estimating soil hydraulic properties from soil data. In the absence of direct measurements, they represent a valuable tool for providing agro-ecological models with soil input estimations, whose accuracy is currently a key issue, especially in fieldand regional-scale modelling which rely on soil information databases. Th...