Abstract
This study was carried out to identify and compare spatial variation of some soil physical and chemical properties in the Jadwal Al_Amir Project/Babylon/Iraq. Soil properties including soil texture fractions (sand, silt, clay), electrolytic conductivity (ECe), calcium carbonate minerals content (CaCO3), and organic matter content (O.M.) were measured by collecting soil samples from (0–30 cm) soil depths at 150 sampling sites. Soil properties were analyzed using both classical and geostatistical methods that included descriptive statistics, semivariograms, cross-semivariograms spatial kriged and co-kriged prediction maps and interpolation. Results indicated that moderate to strong spatial variability existed across the study area for soil properties considered in this study. Strong spatial dependency of soil properties was related to structural intrinsic factors such as parent material and mineralogy. Furthermore, cross-semivariograms exhibited a strong spatial interdependency between clay content with sqrtECe, CaCO3 minerals content, and log O.M. content. These results indicated that cokriging improved predictions for clay content with soil properties studied and considered to be an accurate and adequate procedure for spatial interpolation and evaluation of soil properties considered in this study.
Highlights
Spatial variability of soil physical and chemical properties within or among agricultural fields is inherent in nature due to geologic and pedologic soil forming factors, but some of the variability may be induced by tillage and other management practices
The variability of soil properties within the study area was classified as medium (15–75%) to high ([ 75%) based on the CV values according to the groupings described by Dahiya et al (1984)
This indicates that sqrtECe exhibit high variability while the remaining soil properties quantified in this study exhibit medium variability (15–75%) within the study area. sqrtECe was higher in the study area which faced with a lot of salinity related problems
Summary
Spatial variability of soil physical and chemical properties within or among agricultural fields is inherent in nature due to geologic and pedologic soil forming factors, but some of the variability may be induced by tillage and other management practices. These factors interact with each other across spatial and temporal scales, and are further modified locally by erosion and deposition processes (Iqbal et al 2005). Geostatistics have proved useful for assessing spatial variability of soil properties and have increasingly been utilized by soil scientists and agricultural engineers in recent years (Webster and Oliver 2001). Quantitative information on soil surface texture would be extremely useful for modeling, planning, and managing the soils (Scull et al 2005). Duffera et al (2007) report some soil properties including particle size distribution (soil texture) shows horizontal spatial structure and captured by soil map units i.e. soil texture maps
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