Soil variability in La Violada Irrigation District (Spain): II Characterizing hydrologic and salinity features

The recent modernization of 1.1 Mha of irrigated land in Spain calls for the evaluation of these transformations in terms of environmental impact and resource use efficiency. The available data for this evaluation has increased with the transformation (better, digital and spatially distributed data) allowing for the use of distributed soil water and solute movement models. But most hydrological models require soil hydrologic properties that are costly and time-consuming to gather and soil information in Spain is generally scarce. This paper focuses in analyzing the soil hydrologic features in La Violada Irrigation District (VID; a 5234 ha semi-arid irrigated area recently modernized in northeast Spain) usable in soil water models for the evaluation of the new irrigation system. The recent soil map of the VID (presented in a companion paper) gathered the hydrologic and salinity properties of the horizons in the described soil units. The hydraulic conductivity (Ks) of the horizons was also assessed by the inverse auger-hole method. From these data, the VID was disaggregated in three homogeneous units according to their hydrologic features and Pedotransfer Functions (PTFs) were built for the whole VID (General Model) and separately for the homogeneous soil units (Distributed Model). These PTFs allowed for obtaining field capacity (FC) and wilting point (WP) from texture and organic matter, while Ks depended upon texture and gypsum content. Apparently, there were no salinity issues in VID soils due to irrigation. The high Ca2+ and Mg2+ levels in the saturation extract resulted in generally low SAR, what along with the high gypsum and carbonate contents may help to prevent soil degradation by sodicity. As a result, the homogeneous hydrologic zones defined in VID may be used to recommend specific irrigation practices and as the basis for the application of distributed soil water movement models. These hydrologic properties may be applied directly as inputs to the models while the PTFs may allow for setting adequate parameters in nearby areas with similar soils from more readily available soil information (texture, organic matter and gypsum).

This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the research grants AGL2010-21681-C03-03 and AGL2013-48728-C2-2-R and by the Ebro River Basin Authority through a collaboration protocol. Thanks are given to the Almudévar Water User Association and the Ebro River Basin Administration for their support.

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