Hydrodynamic behaviour of Segura River basin soils: Effects of texture and moisture contents

Soil physical and chemical properties determine the hydrological behaviour of soil. From this hypothesis, the objective of this study was to establish pedotransfer functions able to determine soil hydrodynamic characteristics from the analytical data available in the current soil maps of Segura River watershed. The range of values and the average of every soil parameter were estimated for every soil type. In this work, granulometric characterization was carried out in addition to water retention capacity at 1/3 and 15 atm pressure to 685 arable soil layer samples corresponding to surface A horizons from the soil profiles. It was proven that these parameters did not show important changes on most predominant soil types of the area, being only different in Arenosols, Cambisols, Vertisols and Fluvisols. Therefore, hydrodynamic behaviour of these soil types must be influenced by those parameters.