Abstract
Soil structure plays a major role in the design of new crop management systems. For instance, the transition from conventional to no-tillage changes soil structure, which, in turn, has implications on crop yield greenhouse gas emissions, and pesticide and nitrate leaching. Modelling soil structure at field scale faces two main issues: (1) the spatial variability and (2) the temporal variability. Here, we review how spatial variability of soil structure is taken into account in water transfer models at field scale. We discuss the effects of soil structure on hydraulic properties. We present options to model soil structure effects using pedotransfer functions or calculations based on pore network geometry. Then we review studies on water transfer. Here, we show the utility of one-dimensional (1-D) and 2-D models, and the range of soil profile partitions. In the second part, we study a mean to model the temporal variation of soil structure. We propose an indicator of soil structure dynamics based on the proportion of compacted clods in the tilled layer. This indicator was measured from the observation face of soil pits. We studied this indicator in a long-term field experiment involving various risks of compaction. The results showed that this indicator gave a more precise description of the time course changes in soil structure than the mean soil bulk density measured on the same experimental plots. Lastly, we discuss the principles of a model that predicts the evolution of this indicator under different soil tillage and climatic conditions. This model can be used to evaluate the effects of different crop management systems on soil structure and soil water transfer.
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Acknowledgement
This work was carried out under the project “Soil degradation due to compaction” with the financial support of (1) the “ANR – Agence Nationale de la Recherche – The French National Research Agency” under the “Programme Agriculture et Développement Durable”, project “ANR-05-PADD-013”, (2) the Ministry in charge of the Environment under the programme GESSOL2 “Impact des pratiques agricoles sur le sol et les eaux”.
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Roger-Estrade, J. et al. (2009). Integration of Soil Structure Variations with Time and Space into Models for Crop Management: A Review. In: Lichtfouse, E., Navarrete, M., Debaeke, P., Véronique, S., Alberola, C. (eds) Sustainable Agriculture. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2666-8_49
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