Soil water content and water potential are two important parameters in
determining the status of water in the soil. Improvement in the ability to measure these
parameters by way of increased speed, accuracy, resolution, imaging volume, ease of
automation, as well as reduced calibration requirements and reduced soil disturbance
would...
Soil solution samplers have certain inadequacies that limit their range of
possible applications. Passive Capillary Samplers (PCAPS), which apply suction to the
soil pore-water via a fiber glass wick, have shown promising results in preliminary
experiments in regard to collection efficiency of water and of bromide tracers. The
objectives of...
Safety concerns at the Hanford Reservation require a way to measure the
moisture content of material contained in the high level radioactive waste tanks. The
freezing of material next to a probe was proposed by scientists at Pacific Northwest
Laboratories (PNL) as one approach to solve this problem. It was...
Sandy soils are among the least productive soils because of their inability to
store adequate water for plant growth. Their high percolation rate not only allows
water to move quickly beyond the root zone, but also washes nutrients below the reach
of plant roots. High evaporation occurs from the soil...
Declared out of print March 2010. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog
The Oregon Water Quality Decision Aid (OWQDA) is
a first-tier screening tool that allows you to make a broad
determination of the likelihood that a specific chemical,
when applied to a specific Oregon soil, will move through
the soil and contaminate groundwater. This determination
is called the groundwater vulnerability rating.
Dry land agriculture using summer fallow is a common crop production
practice in the Columbia Plateau region of eastern Oregon. Farmed-over level
terraces are used to control surface water runoff and soil erosion. More than
70 percent of the average annual precipitation around Pendleton, Oregon (350 -
400 mm) falls...
Based on the determination of the zero-flux plane, a water balance procedure
for large-scale experimental databases was automated to estimate the soil water
balance based on soil water content distribution with depth through time. The
automated procedure was verified using data from the BOREAS project obtained in
three Intensive Field...
Approximately 3-4 month-old containerized Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) seedlings (seed zone 262 and 271) were subjected to 6 moisture stress treatments (65, 53, 41, 29, 17 and 7% soil water content by volume of dry soil) starting July 4 to September 22, 1991 at Forest Research Laboratory's greenhouse at...
Soil moisture and temperature regimes during spring-summer 1996 were evaluated
in plots with compaction and organic residues treatments established in 1993 at three sites
in the Sierra National Forest after forest harvesting. The results indicate that the bare
condition (non-compacted soil with total removal of the harvesting residues and forest...
A Study conducted at The Island, Lake Billy Chinook, in Central Oregon, examined
differences in the pattern of soil properties between a sagebrush-grass and a juniper-sagebrush-grass community. Juniper invasion is linked with the desertification
process in which the sagebrush shrubs and perennial grasses decline. Patterns in soil
nutrients and other...