1. An Improved Pedotransfer Function for Soil Hydrological Properties in New Zealand.
- Author
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McNeill, Stephen, Lilburne, Linda, Vickers, Shirley, Webb, Trevor, and Carrick, Samuel
- Subjects
SOIL moisture ,SOIL management ,SOILS ,SOIL mapping ,RESEARCH personnel - Abstract
Featured Application: Landowners, regional and national governments, and researchers can use predictions of the soil hydrological properties created in this work, such as wilting point, field capacity, macroporosity, and total available water content, to characterize soils for soil management decisions in New Zealand, e.g., in terms of irrigation requirements, or for policy, e.g., nutrient budgets and regulations. This paper describes a new pedotransfer function (PTF) for the soil water content of New Zealand soils at seven specific tensions (0, −5, −10, −20, −40, −100, −1500 kPa) using explanatory variables derived from the S-map soil mapping system. The model produces unbiased and physically plausible estimates of the response at each tension, as well as unbiased and physically plausible estimates of the response differences that define derived properties (e.g., macroporosity and total available water content). The PTF is a development of an earlier model using approximately double the number of sites compared with the earlier study, a change in fitting methodology to a semi-parametric GAM Beta response, and the inclusion of sample depth. The results show that the new model has resulted in significant improvements for the soil water content estimates and derived quantities using standard goodness-of-fit measures, based on validation data. A comparison with an international PTF using explanatory variables compatible with variables available from S-map (EUPTF2) suggests that the model is better for prediction of soil water content using the limited information available from the S-map system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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