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Due to inadequate data support, existing algorithms used to estimate soil hydraulic conductivity, K, in (eco)hydrological models ignore the effects of key site factors such as land use and climate and neglect the significant effects of soil structure on water flow at and near saturation. These limitations may introduce serious bias and error into predictions of terrestrial water balances and soil moisture status, and thus plant growth and rates of biogeochemical processes. To resolve these issues, we collated a new global database of hydraulic conductivity measured by tension infiltrometer under field conditions. The results of our analyses on this dataset contrast markedly with those of existing algorithms used to estimate K. We show that the saturated hydraulic conductivity, Ks, in topsoil (<0.3m depth) is only very weakly related to texture. Instead, Ks depends more strongly on bulk density, organic carbon content and land use and management factors. In this respect, the results show that arable sites have, on average, ca. 2 to 3 times smaller Ks values than natural vegetation, forests and perennial agriculture. The data also clearly demonstrates that clay soils have smaller K in the soil matrix and thus a larger contribution of soil macropores to K at and near saturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating pesticide leaching risks at the regional scale requires the ability to completely parameterise a pesticide fate model using only survey data, such as soil and land-use maps. Such parameterisation usually rely on a set of lookup tables and (pedo)transfer functions, relating elementary soil and site properties to model parameters. The aim of this paper is to describe and test a complete set of parameter estimation algorithms developed for the pesticide fate model MACRO, which accounts for preferential flow in soil macropores. We used tracer monitoring data from 16 lysimeter studies, carried out in three European countries, to evaluate the ability of MACRO and this "blind parameterisation" scheme to reproduce measured solute leaching at the base of each lysimeter. We focused on the prediction of early tracer breakthrough due to preferential flow, because this is critical for pesticide leaching. We then calibrated a selected number of parameters in order to assess to what extent the prediction of water and solute leaching could be improved. Our results show that water flow was generally reasonably well predicted (median model efficiency, ME, of 0.42). Although the general pattern of solute leaching was reproduced well by the model, the overall model efficiency was low (median ME=-0.26) due to errors in the timing and magnitude of some peaks. Preferential solute leaching at early pore volumes was also systematically underestimated. Nonetheless, the ranking of soils according to solute loads at early pore volumes was reasonably well estimated (concordance correlation coefficient, CCC, between 0.54 and 0.72). Moreover, we also found that ignoring macropore flow leads to a significant deterioration in the ability of the model to reproduce the observed leaching pattern, and especially the early breakthrough in some soils. Finally, the calibration procedure showed that improving the estimation of solute transport parameters is probably more important than the estimation of water flow parameters. Overall, the results are encouraging for the use of this modelling set-up to estimate pesticide leaching risks at the regional-scale, especially where the objective is to identify vulnerable soils and "source" areas of contamination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preferential flow is a widespread phenomenon that is known to strongly affect solute transport in soil, but our understanding and knowledge is still poor of the site factors and soil properties that promote it. To investigate these relationships, we assembled a database from the peer-reviewed literature containing information on 793 breakthrough curve experiments under steady-state flow conditions. Most of the collected experiments (642 of the 793 datasets) had been conducted on undisturbed soil columns, although some experiments on repacked soil, clean sands, and glass beads were also included. In addition to the apparent dispersivity, we focused attention on three potential indicators of preferential solute transport, namely the 5 %-arrival time, the holdback factor, and the ratio of piston-flow and average transport velocities. Our results suggest that in contrast to the 5 %-arrival time and the holdback factor, the piston-flow to transport velocity ratio is not related to preferential macropore transport but rather to the exclusion or retardation of the applied tracer. Confirming that the apparent longitudinal dispersivity is positively correlated with the travel distance of the tracer, our results also illustrate that this correlation is refined if the normalized 5 %-tracer arrival time is also taken into account. In particular, we found that the degree of preferential solute transport increases with apparent dispersivity and decreases with travel distance. A similar but weaker relationship was observed between apparent dispersivity, 5 %-tracer arrival time, and lateral observation scale, such that the strength of preferential transport increases with lateral observation scale. However, we also found that the travel distance and the lateral observation scale in the investigated dataset are correlated which makes it difficult to distinguish their influence on these transport characteristics. We observed that anionic tracers exhibited larger apparent dispersivities than electrically neutral tracers under comparable experimental conditions. We also found that the strength of preferential transport increased at larger flow rates and water saturations, which suggests that macropore flow was a more important flow mechanism than heterogeneous flow in the soil matrix. Nevertheless, our data shows that heterogeneous flow in the soil matrix also occasionally leads to strong preferential transport. Furthermore, we show that preferential solute transport under steady-state flow depends on soil texture in a threshold-like manner: moderate to strong preferential transport was found to occur only for undisturbed soils which contain more than 8 % clay. Preferential flow characteristics were also absent for columns filled with glass beads, clean sands, or sieved soil. No clear effect of land use on the pattern of solute transport could be discerned, probably because the available dataset was too small and too much affected by cross-correlations with experimental conditions. Our results suggest that in developing pedotransfer functions for solute transport properties of soils it is critically important to account for travel distance, lateral observation scale, and water flow rate and saturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]