Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2017KY266B

Application of pedotransfer function for estimating soil water permeability at field scale, western Kentucky: calibration and validation

Institute: Kentucky
Year Established: 2017 Start Date: 2017-03-01 End Date: 2018-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $5,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $10,000

Principal Investigators: Ole Wendroth

Abstract: The main objective of the proposed research is to evaluate pedotransfer functions (PTF) for estimating saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) at field scale in a western Kentucky field, specifically: (1) to investigate the primary influencing factors of Ks in the field by principal component analysis (PCA); (2) to identify the most appropriate PTF in the field by calibrating the selected existing PTFs and evaluating their performance; (3) to derive local PTFs through multiple regression and artificial neural network (ANN) methods based on selected influencing factors of Ks; and (4) to characterize the spatial pattern of Ks in the field by cokriging or other co-regionalization methods.