Abstract
Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) are equations used to estimate soil characteristics difficult to determine from other easily obtained ones. Water retention in soil is used in several agronomic and environmental applications, but its direct determination is time consuming and onerous, therefore PTFs are alternatives to obtaining this information more quickly and economically. The aims of this study were to generate a database and develop PTFs for water retention at potentials of -33 kPa (field capacity) and -1500 kPa (permanent wilting point) for Yellow Argisol and Yellow Latosol from the Brazilian Coastal Plains region. The Coastal Plains soils are mostly developed from Barreiras formation (pre-weathered sediments) and their main uses are sugarcane, livestock, forestry and fruticulture. The database to generate the PTFs was composed from the selection of information derived from scientific works and soil survey reports of the region. Specific PTFs were generated for each soil class, in their respective A and B horizons and for solum, through multiple regression by stepwise package of R language programming. Due to the small pedological variability (small number of soil classes containing great geographical expression) and mineralogical uniformity, usually observed in this environment, non-stratification of soil classes to create general PTFs presented similar or superior results compared to equations for each soil class. The adjustment of data demonstrated that water retention values at -33 kPa and -1500 kPa potentials can be estimated with adequate accuracy for the main soils of the Brazilian Coastal Plains through PTFs mainly from particle size distribution and secondarily from organic matter data.
Highlights
The importance of knowledge about hydrical characteristics of soil is related to its direct influence on water reservoir and availability to plants
The database for Pedotransfer Functions (PTFs) generation was composed of soil profiles data from scientific works and soil survey reports of the Brazilian Coastal Plains region. 69 soil profiles were utilized, being 55 of Yellow Argisol (YA) and 14 of Yellow Latosol (YL), making up a total of 138 soil horizons (A and B)
The water content retained at -33 kPa (FC) and -1500 kPa (PWP) varied from 2.6 to 25.8, and from 0.9 to 18.4 dag kg-1, respectively
Summary
The importance of knowledge about hydrical characteristics of soil is related to its direct influence on water reservoir and availability to plants. These characteristics are difficult to be determined due to the high cost analyses, time and personal demand. In order to facilitate the obtaining of data on water content at specific matric potentials, many researchers have proposed mathematical models for estimating water retention from. These models are denominated Pedotransfer Functions (PTFs). In Brazil, the major difficulty to the development of such models is the relative scarcity of data bases in different regions
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