Award details

Pore-scale modelling of soil structure and function

Reference	BBS/E/C/00004690
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Andrew Whitmore
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Dr Nigel Bird
Institution	Rothamsted Research
Department	Rothamsted Research Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	587,684
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/04/2005
End date	31/03/2008
Duration	36 months

Abstract

This project aims to advance our understanding and description of the soil micro structure and the importance of this structure in controlling a range of interacting soil properties and processes including soil hydraulics, microbial activity and carbon and nitrogen turnover, and soil stability. The project integrates with the soil physics program addressing soil processes at the microscale and allowing for a highly mechanistic approach to modelling. Soil structures cover a range of complexity from very simple monoscale structures arising from packing of primary particles to hierarchical and multiscale structures arising from aggregation and fragmentation processes. Our research indicates that some of the popular methods for extracting and inferring fractal characteristics from soil images are not robust and that more critical analysis of soil data is needed to extract measures of complexity. In addition to a purely descriptive approach to soil structure we shall engage in a mechanistic modelling approach to investigate its origin and its dynamic nature through studies of aggregation and fragmentation, the driving forces for structural genesis, evolution and degradation. We shall explore the use of discrete mathematical models drawn from percolation theory to examine the local bonding interactions between soil particles and, through upscaling, higher-order structural units in order to gain a mechanistic handle on the processes of aggregation and disruption and an enhanced understanding of soil stability. Equipped with suitable descriptions of the soil micro-structure we shall extend our studies of air-water distribution in pore networks, explicitly accounting for geometry and connectivity of the pore space, and the implications of such distributions for microbial function and carbon and nitrogen turnover.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Agri-food (AF)
Research Topics	X – not assigned to a current Research Topic
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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