Low quality water has been widely used for irrigation all over the world due to water shortage.However,the use of low quality water may cause accumulation of salt in root-zone soils,resulting in poor nitrogen utilization by crops.The objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of sodium chloride(NaCl)on mineralization and nitrification of soils in the North China Plain(NCP).The experiments were conducted with laboratory incubators at 30℃.Five levels of NaCl-salt concentrations 0%,2%,3%,5%and 8%in the added solutions were used in the soil samples collected from NCP.The mineralization at NaCl-salt concentration lower than 3%was not significantly different from that of the control,whereas,significant inhibition of mineralization was found in the treatments with NaCl-salt concentration higher than 3%.The inhibition of mineralization was attributed to the retardation of nitrification in relatively high salt content because ammonification was not depressed by the added NaCl salt.The gas losses and nitrification were found decreasing with the increase in salinity.It was also found that the nitrification was more sensitive to salinity than the mineralization.Nitrification of soil samples was inhibited by 44.72%,57.87%,and 83.64%compared with the control after 38 days of incubation at NaCl-salt concentrations of 3%,5%and 8%,respectively.The time dependence of both the mineralization and nitrification can be fitted into a first-order kinetic model.The rate constant of mineralization and nitrification decreased exponentially with the salt content in the soils.The results of the present research may provide some scientific implications for the use of saline water or treated sewage water in the farming regions of the NCP.
The van Genuchten (vG) function is often used to describe the soil water retention curve (SWRC) of unsaturated soils and fractured rock. The objective of this study was to develop a method to determine the vG model parameter m from the fractal dimension. We compared two approaches previously proposed by van Genuchten and Lenhard et al. for estimating m from the pore size distribution index of the Brooks and Corey (BC) model. In both approaches we used a relationship between the pore size distribution index of the BC model and the fractal dimension of the SWRC. A dataset containing 75 samples from the UNSODA unsaturated soil hydraulic database was used to evaluate the two approaches. The statistical parameters showed that the approach by Lenhard et al. provided better estimates of the parameter m. Another dataset containing 72 samples from the literature was used to validate Lenhard's approach in which the SWRC fractal dimension was estimated from the clay content. The estimated SWRC of the second dataset was compared with those obtained with the Rosetta model using sand, silt, and clay contents. Root mean square error values of the proposed fractal approach and Rosetta were 0.081 and 0.136, respectively, indicating that the proposed fractal approach performed better than the Rosetta model.
B. GHANBARIAN-ALAVIJEHA. LIAGHATHUANG Guan-HuaM. Th. VAN GENUCHTEN
