Transformation of soil texture schemes and determination of water-physical properties of soils

Abstract

Measuring soil water-physical properties is laborious, time-consuming, and expensive. Thatprovokes a lot of scientists to estimate them which action is troubled by the usage of differentsoil texture classification systems. The study proposes a rapid, reliable, and universallyapplicable methodology for soil textural transformations between different classificationsystems. The method of discrete mathematics is applied to make the conversion of particlesize classes from the Kachinsky system, which is used in Bulgaria to the Internationalsystems. Three different data sources were used to determine the water-physical propertiesof soils from textural data - 376 soil profiles from Bulgaria, extraction from the SoilGridssystem for the Plovdiv district in Bulgaria and data from CanSIS/NSDB database. Therelationship between the dependent variables field capacity (FC), wilting point (WP) and bulkdensity (BD), and independent variables sand, silt, and clay soil content was sought in theform of a regression equation. The applied stepwise regression procedure produces a closedependence between the soil texture and its water-physical properties.