Abstract
In Europe, the establishment of short rotation coppice (SRC) systems for biomass production has been expanding in the last decades. Several studies have considered the impacts of SRC on soil properties; many have focused on studying its effect on biochemical properties while only a few have addressed physical and hydraulic properties. This study reports the assessment of soil physical and hydraulic properties on two SRC sites on sandy soils planted with 3-year-old poplar trees and an adjacent conventional agricultural field in Western Slovakia. All sites contain a comparable sandy loam soil texture and both SRC fields differed only in the groundwater accessibility. Water infiltration experiments were conducted in the field with subsequent sampling of the upper topsoil (0–5 cm depth). The samples were further processed in the laboratory to obtain the water retention and hydraulic conductivity functions of the soil covering a wide range of soil pore saturation. These hydraulic functions were fitted by using the bimodal version of Kosugi-Mualem’s hydraulic model to estimate the pore-size distribution (PSD) of the soils. The comparison between the SRC field neighboring the agricultural field and the latter showed similar hydraulic soil properties such as the topsoil water retention. However, macropore content, bulk density (BD) and infiltration capacity differed under SRC particularly in the tree row. Analogously, the two SRC fields showed similar topsoil water contents. Other soil properties differed presenting an increased macropore content and higher BD in the SRC field with distant groundwater connection. Our findings suggest that the SRC management may influence the topsoil properties.
Highlights
Poplar plantations for bioenergy or dendromass production have been expanding in Europe in the last decades
The objectives of this study were to (1) evaluate the impact of short rotation coppice (SRC) on the topsoil hydraulic properties in contrast to an adjacent agricultural field and (2) to analyse the effect on SRC topsoil properties brought by different groundwater accessibility
The experiments were performed on three adjacent sites (Fig. 1): two under poplar SRC sites, with statistically different groundwater accessibility (p < 0.05), SRC-D (D stands for distant groundwater access) and SRC-N (N stands for near groundwater access) and one agricultural land
Summary
Poplar plantations for bioenergy or dendromass production have been expanding in Europe in the last decades. This development has been largely supported by policy makers under the framework of the EU Biomass Action Plan and the Renewable Energy Directive [1] since products derived from agriculture and forestry play a key role to mitigate climate change and to secure energy supply. Soil-related investigations have mainly focused on the impacts of SRC on soil ecology [8,9,10,11,12,13], whereas changes on soil physical properties have been poorly studied. Evaluations of soil properties mainly occurred as part of an assessment of site characteristics affecting SRC size, quality and sustainability of yields [14, 15]
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