Calzolari C., Ungaro F., 2001, Using existing soil databases for estimating water-retention properties for soils of the Pianura Padano-Veneta region of North Italy, Geoderma (Amst.) 99 (2001): 99–112.,
URL: http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/167554

Data collected on benchmark soils from experimental sites in the Pianura Padano-Veneta, Northern Italy, stored in local soil data bases were used to test the reliability of existing pedotransfer functions to derive soil water retention properties, required as input to simulation models of pollutant transport in soils. Eight different algorithms were selected according to their principle of calculation, input variable requirements and in agreement with the different information currently existing in local soil databases. Results were validated against an experimental set of 139 retention curves. In order to assess the validity of the selected pedotransfer functions and to provide operative guidelines for their selection, quantitative error indices mean difference, and square root of the mean squared difference, were calculated and the results evaluated for the whole data set and for subsets of observations classed in terms of soil textural composition, bulk density, organic carbon content and matric potential. Non-parametric significance tests for unbalanced data were applied to assess the significance of the differences among classes. According to the kind of soil on which they were tested, the selected pedotransfer functions showed significantly different responses in terms of accuracy, providing therefore useful indications for their optimal applicability for different levels of available information.

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