Beerkan multi-runs for characterizing water infiltration and spatial variability of soil hydraulic properties across scales

Abstract : A method is presented for characterizing the spatial variability of water infiltration and soil hydraulic properties at the transect and field scales. The method involves monitoring a set of 10 Beerkan runs distributed over a 1-m length of soil, and running BEST (Beerkan estimation of soil transfer parameters) methods to derive hydraulic parameters. The Beerkan multi-runs (BMR) method provides a significant amount of data at the transect scale, allowing the determination of correlations between water infiltration variables and hydraulic parameters, and the detection of specific runs affected by preferential flow or water repellence. The realization of several BMRs at several transects on the same site allows comparison of the variation between locations (spatial variability at the field scale) and at the transect scale (spatial variability at the metre scale), using analysis of variance. From the results, we determined the spatial variability of water infiltration and hydraulic parameters as well as its characteristic scale (transect versus field).