References

NPG

Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics

NPG

Nonlin. Processes Geophys.

1607-7946

Copernicus Publications

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/npg-15-575-2008

Quantification of tillage, plant cover, and cumulative rainfall effects on soil surface microrelief by statistical, geostatistical and fractal indices

Paz-Ferreiro

¹ Bertol

² Vidal Vázquez

Faculty of Sciences, University of Corunna-UDC, Spain

Soil and Natural Resources Department, University of Santa Catarina State-UDESC, Brazil

23 07 2008

15 4 575 590

2008

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This article is available from https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/15/575/2008/npg-15-575-2008.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/15/575/2008/npg-15-575-2008.pdf

Changes in soil surface microrelief with cumulative rainfall under different tillage systems and crop cover conditions were investigated in southern Brazil. Surface cover was none (fallow) or the crop succession maize followed by oats. Tillage treatments were: 1) conventional tillage on bare soil (BS), 2) conventional tillage (CT), 3) minimum tillage (MT) and 4) no tillage (NT) under maize and oats. Measurements were taken with a manual relief meter on small rectangular grids of 0.234 and 0.156 m2, throughout growing season of maize and oats, respectively. Each data set consisted of 200 point height readings, the size of the smallest cells being 3×5 cm during maize and 2×5 cm during oats growth periods. Random Roughness (RR), Limiting Difference (LD), Limiting Slope (LS) and two fractal parameters, fractal dimension (D) and crossover length (l) were estimated from the measured microtopographic data sets. Indices describing the vertical component of soil roughness such as RR, LD and l generally decreased with cumulative rain in the BS treatment, left fallow, and in the CT and MT treatments under maize and oats canopy. However, these indices were not substantially affected by cumulative rain in the NT treatment, whose surface was protected with previous crop residues. Roughness decay from initial values was larger in the BS treatment than in CT and MT treatments. Moreover, roughness decay generally tended to be faster under maize than under oats. The RR and LD indices decreased quadratically, while the l index decreased exponentially in the tilled, BS, CT and MT treatments. Crossover length was sensitive to differences in soil roughness conditions allowing a description of microrelief decay due to rainfall in the tilled treatments, although better correlations between cumulative rainfall and the most commonly used indices RR and LD were obtained. At the studied scale, parameters l and D have been found to be useful in interpreting the configuration properties of the soil surface microrelief.

References 1

Allmaras, R. R., Burwell, R. E., Larson, W. E., and Holt, R. F.: Total porosity and random roughness of the interrow zone as influenced by tillage, USDA Conservation Res. Rep., 7, 22 pp., 1966.

Armstrong, A. C.: On the fractal dimensions of some transient soil properties, J. of Soil Sci., 37, 641–652, 1986.

Bertol, I., Schick, J., Batistela, O., Leite, D., Visentin, D., and Cogo, N. P.: Erosividade das chuvas e sua distribuição entre 1989 e 1998 no Municipio de Lages (SC) (In portuguese), Brazilian Revue of Soil Science, 26, 455–464, 2002a.

Bertol, I., Schick, J., Batistela, O., Leite, D., and Amaral, A. J.: Erodibilidade de um Cambissolo H\'umico alumínico léptico, determinada sob chuva natural entre 1989 e 1998 em Lages (SC) (In portuguese), Brazilian Revue of Soil Science, 26, 465–471, 2002b.

Bertol, I., Amaral, A., Vidal Vázquez E., Paz González, A., Barbosa, F. T., and Brignoni, L. F.: Relações da rugosidade superficial do solo com o volume de chuvas e com a estabilidade dos agregados em água (In Portuguese), Brazilian Revue of Soil Science, 30, 543–555, 2006.

Bertuzzi, P., Rauws, G., and Courault, D.: Testing roughness indices to estimate soil surface changes due to simulated rainfall, Soil Till. Res., 17, 87–99, 1990.

Burrough, P. A.: Multiscale sources of spatial variation in soil. I. The application of fractal concepts to nested levels of soil variation, J. Soil Sci., 34, 577–597, 1983a.

Burrough, P. A.: Multiscale sources of spatial variation in soil. II. A non-Brownian fractal model and its application in soil survey, J. Soil Sci., 34, 599–620, 1983b.

Carr, A. D. and Benzer, W. B.: On the practice of estimating fractal dimension, Math. Geol., 23, 945–958, 1991.

Currence, H. D. and Lovely, W. G.: The analysis of soil surface roughness, Trans. ASAE, 13, 710–714, 1970.

Darboux, F. and Huang, C. H.: Does soil surface roughness increase or decrease water and particle transfer?, Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 69, 748–756, 2005.

Davies, S. and Hall, P.: Fractal analysis of surface roughness by using spatial data, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B), Statistical Methodology, 61, 3–37, 1999.

Dexter, A. R.: Effect of rainfall on the surface micro-relief of tilled soil. J. Terramechanics, 14, 11–22, 1977.

Eltz F. L. F. and Norton L. D.: Surface roughness changes as affected by rainfall erosivity, tillage, and canopy cover, Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 61, 1746–1755, 1997.

Favis-Mortlock, D. T., Boardman, J., Parsons, A. J., and Lascelles, B.: Emergence and erosion: a model for rill erosion and development, Hydrol. Processes, 14, 2173–2205, 2000.

Gallart, F. and Pardini, G.: Perfilru: un programa para el análisis de perfiles microtopográficos mediante el estudio de la geometría fractal, (in Spanish), Cadernos Lab. Xeolóxico de Laxe 21, 169–178, 1996.

Hairsine, P. B., Moran, C. J. and Rose, C. W.: Recent developments regarding the influence of soil surface characteristics on overland flow and erosion. Aus. J. Soil. Res., 30, 249–264, 1992.

Hansen, B., Schönning, P., and Sibbesen, E.: Roughness indices for estimation of depression storage capacity of tilled soil surfaces, Soil and Tillage Research, 52, 103–111, 1999.

Helming, K., Römkens, M. J. M., and Prasad, S. N.: Surface roughness related processes of runoff and soil loss: a flume study, Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 62, 243–250. 1998.

Huang, C. and Bradford J. M.: Depressional storage for Markov-Gaussian surfaces, Water Resour. Res., 26, 2235–2242, 1990.

Huang, C. and Bradford J. M.: Applications of a laser scanner to quantify soil microtopography, Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 56, 14–21, 1992.

Huang, C.: Quantification of soil microtopography and surface roughness, in: Fractals in Soil, edited by: Baveye, P., Parlange, J. Y. and Stewart, B. A., Science, 377 pp., 1998.

Kamphorst, E. C., Jetten, V., Guerif, J., Pitkanen, J., Iversen, B. V., Douglas, J. T., and Paz, A.: How to predict maximum water storage in depressions from soil roughness measurements, Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 64, 1749–1758, 2000.

Linden D. R. and van Doren, D. M.: Parameters for characterizating tillage induced soil surface roughness, Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 50, 1560–1565, 1986.

Lovejoy, S. and Schertzer, D.: Scaling and multiftractal fields in the solid earth and topography, Nonlin. Processes Geophys., 14, 465–502, 2007

Malinverno, A.: A single method to estimate the fractal dimension of self-affine series, Geophysical Research Letters, 17(11), 1953, 1990.

Mandelbrot, B. B.: The fractal geometry of nature, Freeman, San Francisco, 1983.

Mandelbrot, B. B.: Self-affine fractals and fractal dimension, Physica Scripta, 32, 257–260, 1985.

Mandelbrot, B. B. and van Ness, J. V.: Fractal Brownian motions, fractal noises and applications, SIAM Review, 10(4), 422–437, 1968.

Martinez-Turanzas, G. A., Coffin, D. P., and Burke, I. C.: Development of microtopography in a semi-arid grassland: Effects of disturbance size and soil texture. Plant and Soil, 161, 163–171, 1997.

Merril, S. D., Huang, C., Zobeck, T. M., and Tanaka, D. L.: Use of the chain set for scale-sensitive and erosion-relevant measurements of soil surface roughness, in: Sustaining the global farm, edited by: Stott, D. E., Mothar R. H., and Steihardt, D. C., 594–600, 2001.

Miranda, J. G. V.: Análisis fractal del microrrelieve del suelo (In Spanish), Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Coruña, Spain, 313 pp., 2000.

Pardini, G.: Fractal scaling of surface roughness in artificially weathered smectite-rich soil regoliths, Geoderma, 117(11), 157–167, 2003.

Pardini, G. and Gallart, F.A.: Combination of laser technology and fractals to analyse soil surface roughness, Eur. J. Soil Sci., 49, 197–202, 1998.

Pfeifer, P. and Obert, M.: Fractals: basic concepts and terminology, in: The fractal approach to Heterogeneous Chemistry, edited by: Avnir, D., Surfaces, Colloids, Polymers. Wiley. New York, 11–43, 1989.

Römkens, M. J. M. and Wang, J. Y.: Effect of tillage on surface roughness, Trans. ASAE 29, 429–433, 1986.

Soil Survey Staff Division: Soil survey manual, USDA Handb. 18. US Gov. Print. Office. Washington DC, 1993.

Vidal Vázquez, E., Paz González, A., and Vivas Miranda, J. G. V.: Characterizing isotropy and heterogeneity of soil surface microtopography using fractal models, Ecological Modelling, 182, 337–353, 2005.

Vidal Vázquez, E., Miranda, J. G. V., Alves, M. C., and Paz González, A.: Effect of tillage on fractal indices describing soil surface microrelief of a Brazilian Alfisol, Geoderma, 134(3–4), 428–439, 2006.

Vidal Vázquez, E., Miranda, J. G. V., and Paz González, A: Describing soil surface microrelief by crossover length and fractal dimension, Nonlin. Processes Geophys., 14, 223–235, 2007.

Voss, R. F.: Random fractals: characterization and measurement. Scaled Phenomena in Disordered Systems. New York. Plenum Press. 1-11, 1985.

Wagner, L. E. and Yiming Yu: Digitization of profile meter photographs. Trans. Am. Soc. Agric. Eng., 34, 412–416, 1991.

Zobeck, T. M. and Onstad, C. A.: Tillage and rainfall effects on random roughness: A review. Soil and Tillage Research, 9, 1–20, 1987.

Zribi, M., Ciarlett, V., Taconet, O., Paille, J. and Boissard, P.: Characterization of the soil structure and microwave backscattering based on numerical three-dimensional surface representation: Analysis with a fractional Brownian model, Remote Sensing of Environment, 72, 159–169, 2000.