Abstract
The saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) is one of the most important soil properties for many hydrological simulation models. Especially in South Korea, analyzing the Ks of the forest soil is essential for understanding the water cycle throughout the country, because forests cover almost two-thirds of the whole country. However, few studies have focused on the forest soil in the temperate climate zone on a nationwide scale. In this study, 1456 forest soil samples were collected throughout South Korea and pedo-transfer functions employed to predict the Ks were developed. The non-linearities of the soil and topographic features were considered with the pretreatment of variables, and the variance inflation factor was used for treating the multicollinearity problem. The forest stand and site characteristics were also categorized by an ANOVA and post hoc test due to their diversity. As a result, the Ks values were different for various forest stands and site characteristics, which was statistically significant. Additionally, the model performance was higher when both soil properties and topographic features were considered. The sensitivity analysis showed that the Ks was highly affected by the bulk density, sand fraction, slope, and upper catchment area. Therefore, the topographic features were as important in predicting the Ks as the soil properties of the forest soil.
Highlights
The saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks ) is an important factor that represents the basic properties of soil
In South Korea, forest covers about two-thirds of the land area of the whole country
Six pedo-transfer function (PTF) did not focus on the forest soil, and many previous studies were based on various land use types
Summary
The saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks ) is an important factor that represents the basic properties of soil It can represent the rate of infiltration, so it is essential for understanding the water cycle through soil, such as water recharge, drainage, baseflow, and runoff generation [1]. Many hydraulic simulation models, such as TOPMODEL, HYDRUS, and DHSVM, have been developed to simulate the water flow in a catchment [2,3,4]. These models have several input variables for simulation, and the Ks is included in the model equations, which means that the Ks can directly influence the model outcomes [4].
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