New pedotransfer functions for soil water retention curves that better account for bulk density effects

Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) describing soil water retention curves (WRCs) have been widely used in crop, soil, and land surface models. A limitation of the available PTFs is that they fail to account for shape changes in WRCs due to bulk density variations caused by soil tillage, compaction, and other processes. This study develops new PTFs that include bulk density effects on the WRC shape. A new framework is introduced to build the bulk density-associated PTFs based on a widely-used WRC dataset. The new PTFs were validated by comparing the performance with two common PTFs from the literature using two independent datasets. The results show that the newly developed PTFs provide reliable WRC estimates for the validation datasets, with mean RMSE values of 0.055 and 0.059 m(3) m(-3), respectively. The accuracy of the new PTFs is comparable or in some cases better than the common PTFs. While the literature PTFs investigated do not always properly describe bulk density effects on WRC changes, the new PTFs effectively account for such effects on the WRC shape, thus have the potential to be integrated into crop and soil management models to represent bulk density impacts on WRCs due to anthropogenic (e.g., plowing and compaction) and natural (e.g., wetting/drying) processes.

Automated summary

This study developed new Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) that include bulk density effects on soil water retention curves (WRCs), providing reliable WRC estimates and potentially being integrated into crop and soil management models.