Pedosphere 12(3): 201--206, 2002
ISSN 1002-0160/CN 32-1315/P
©2002 Soil Science Society of China
Published by Elsevier B.V. and Science Press
| Introducing fractal dimension to estimation of soil sensitivity to preferential flow |
| CHENG Zhu-Hua, ZHANG Jia-Bao and ZHU An-Ning |
| Department of Soil Physics, Institute of Soil Science, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, P. O. Box 821, Nanjing 210008 (China) |
| ABSTRACT |
| Food dye Brilliant Blue was introduced as the tracer in a dye-tracing experiment to obtain dye profile patterns of sandy loam soil, aeolian sandy soil, percolating paddy soil and permeable paddy soil. The dyed soil profiles were then photographed and the photos were scanned into a computer. Edited with certainsoftware, only the dyed areas were left on the profile photos, which indicted the preferential flow paths for water and solute transport. Fractal dimensions of the dye patterns were calculated according to Arnold's function. Soil particle size distribution was analyzed by pipette method. The regression analysis showed that there was significant relationship between soil clay content and fractal dimension D of the dye pattern of soil profile. Based on the experiment results, the possibility of introducing fractal dimension to estimation of soil sensitivity to preferential flow is discussed. |
| Key Words: dye tracing, fractal dimension, preferential flow, sensitivity, soil clay content |
| Citation: Cheng, Z. H., Zhang, J. B. and Zhu, A. N. 2002. Introducing fractal dimension to estimation of soil sensitivity to preferential flow. Pedosphere. 12(3): 201-206. |
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