Estimating the water retention curve from soil properties: comparison of linear, nonlinear and concomitant variable methods

The unsaturated soil hydraulic functions involving the soil–water retention curve (SWRC) and the hydraulic conductivity provide useful integrated indices of soil quality. Existing and newly devised methods were used to formulate pedotransfer functions (PTFs) that predict the SWRC from readily available soil data. The PTFs were calibrated using a large soils database from Hungary. The database contains measured soil–water retention data, the dry bulk density, sand, silt and clay percentages, and the organic matter content of 305 soil layers from some 80 soil profiles. A three-parameter van Genuchten type function was fitted to the measured retention data to obtain SWRC parameters for each soil sample in the database. Using a quasi-random procedure, the database was divided into “evaluation” (EVAL) and “test” (TEST) parts containing 225 and 80 soil samples, respectively. Linear PTFs for the SWRC parameters were calculated for the EVAL database. The PTFs used for this purpose particle-size percentages, dry bulk density, organic matter content, and the sand/silt ratio, as well as simple transforms (such as logarithms and products) of these independent variables. Of the various independent variables, the eight most significant were used to calculate the different PTFs. A nonlinear (NL) predictive method was obtained by substituting the linear PTFs directly into the SWRC equation, and subsequently adjusting the PTF parameters to all retention data of the EVAL database. The estimation error (SSQ) and efficiency (EE) were used to compare the effectiveness of the linear and nonlinearly adjusted PTFs. We found that EE of the EVAL and the TEST databases increased by 4 and 7%, respectively, using the second nonlinear optimization approach. To further increase EE, one measured retention data point was used as an additional (concomitant) variable in the PTFs. Using the 20 kPa water retention data point in the linear PTFs improved the EE by about 25% for the TEST data set. Nonlinear adjustment of the concomitant variable PTF using the 20 kPa retention data point as concomitant variable produced the best PTF. This PTF produced EE values of 93 and 88% for the EVAL and TEST soil data sets, respectively.