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Soil hydrological properties after wildfire

Petter Nyman
PhD candidate, Department of Forest and Ecosystem Science, University of Melbourne, Australia

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Wildfire in forested catchments can result in adverse impacts on water quality due to increased erosion rates. The increased post-fire erosion rate has been attributed to a number of factors relating to both erodibility of source material and the hydrological mechanisms by which material is mobilized and redistributed (Shakesby and Doerr, 2006).

As part of his PhD, Petter Nyman is working with the Forests & Water Research Group at the Department of Forest and Ecosystem Science, aiming to quantify the probability of critical water quality impacts following wildfire in Eucalypt forests in southeast Australia. The project is designed to parameterize and develop a hillslope erosion model that focuses on the processes and conditions that trigger post-fire debris flows and which take into account the temporal changes in the key properties of the system as it recovers from the wildfire disturbance.

The mini disc infiltrometer (Decagon™) has proved to be a very useful device for measuring soil infiltration properties in burnt forest soils (eg. Moody et al., 2009; Robichaud et al., 2008). Key features of the mini-disc infiltrometer that make it suitable for our systems include:

  1. The small disc diameter means that contact material is unnecessary and level surfaces can easily be located on steep slopes,
  2. The device requires small volumes of water which can be carried in a portable water bladder carried as a backpack
  3. Measurements are quick, cheap, and suitable for capturing spatial and temporal variability in infiltration when other methods are too time consuming or resource intensive. The parameters can be represented as probability distributions by obtaining a large number of replicate measurements.
  4. Measurements can be conducted on small intact cores under controlled conditions in a laboratory.

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References

Moody JA, Kinner DA, Úbeda X. 2009. Linking hydraulic properties of fire-affected soils to infiltration and water repellency. Journal of Hydrology 379: 291-303.

Robichaud PR, Lewis SA, Ashmun LE. 2008. New procedure for sampling infiltration to assess post-fire soil water repellency. United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service: Fort Collins.

Shakesby RA, Doerr SH. 2006. Wildfire as a hydrological and geomorphological agent. Earth-Science Reviews 74: 269-307.



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