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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Mississippi State, Mississippi » Crop Science Research Laboratory » Genetics and Sustainable Agriculture Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #312548
Title: Soil infiltration characteristics in the Tarim River floodplain

Author
item LI, XINHU - Chinese Academy Of Sciences
item Feng, Gary
item ZHAO, CHENGYI - Chinese Academy Of Sciences
item SHI, FENGZHI - Chinese Academy Of Sciences

Submitted to: Environmental Earth Sciences
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/19/2016
Publication Date: 4/25/2016
Citation: Li, X., Feng, G.G., Zhao, C., Shi, F. 2016. Soil infiltration characteristics in the Tarim River floodplain. Environmental Earth Sciences. (2016)75:782.

Interpretive Summary: Floods are important sources of recharge water in most of the world’s water limited lands. With suitable management practices, floods can be of benefit to ecology in the arid and semi-arid areas. Flood spreading is one of the suitable methods for flood management and water harvesting that increases the groundwater recharge, makes soil more fertile and provides soil with nutrients. At a global scale, warming of the atmosphere will increase its capacity to hold water and accelerate redistribution of water in the atmosphere. Global warming is also associated with increased flooding. Therefore, flooding will have a greater impact on the water cycle and ecology in the future. Results in the Tarim River Basin indicated soils on forest and shrub land use types had higher infiltration, while the soils on bare ground land use had low infiltration rate. There were positive relationships between water head and infiltration rate for soils under forest and shrub, but there were no significant relationship between water head and infiltration rate under bare ground. Soil crust and high salinity had large influence on infiltration. Our research provided results for explanation of some positive ecological effect of river overflowing in Tarim River Basin.

Technical Abstract: Overflow from rivers play an important role for ecological conservation in Tarim Basin, however, there was limited information on infiltration from overflow of the Tarim River. The objective of this study was to investigate steady infiltration rate for three types of land use (forest, shrub and bare ground) under four water depth gradients (5 cm, 10 cm, 20 cm and 30 cm hydraulic head) in overflowing areas of Tarim River. Our analysis revealed that the forest and shrub lands had high infiltration and there was a strong linear relationship between water head and infiltration rate for both forest and shrub lands (R2=0.984 and R2 =0. 978, n=20). The bare ground showed low infiltration rate and there was no significant relationship between water head (<30cm) and infiltration rate. While soil crust and high salinity appeared to influence infiltration across the three land use types, soil organic material did not have an effect on infiltration in overflowing area of Tarim River.