Variabilidade de solos hidromórficos: uma abordagem de espaço de estados

Abstract

Soil land leveling is a technique used in low land areas and has the objective to improve agricultural use to facilitate the management of water both for irrigation and drainage operations, for the establishment of agricultural practices and crop harvest. However, it causes changes in the physical environment where the plant grows, and many studies have sought to identify the effect of this practice in the structure of soil spatial variability and in the relationship between the hydric-physical and chemical soil attributes. Thus, the objective of this study was to identify and characterize the structure of spatial variability of soil hydric-physical and chemical attributes of a low land soil, before and after land leveling, and to study the relationship between these soil attributes through an autoregressive state space model. In an experimental area of 0.81 ha belongs to Embrapa Clima Temperado situated in Capão do Leão county, state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, was established a regular grid of 100 points spaced 10 m apart in both directions. At each point, soil disturbed and undisturbed samples were collected at the depth of 0-0.20 m to determine, before and after land leveling, the following soil attributes: clay, silt and sand contents, soil macroporosity, soil microporosity and soil total porosity, soil bulk density and soil water content at field capacity and permanent wilting point, soil organic carbon and cation exchange capacity. All data sets were organized into a spreadsheet in the form of a spatial transect consisting of 100 points and they were ordered following the gradient slope area resulting from the soil land leveling. Autocorrelograms and crosscorrelograms were built to evaluate the structure of spatial correlation of all soil attributes having served as a subsidy for the selection of variables in each autoregressive state-space model. The results show that the soil land leveling changed the structure of soil spatial dependence of all variables and between them as well. The soil cation exchange capacity and soil microporosity variables were the variables that made up the largest number of state space models, before and after soil land leveling. The contribution of the each variable at position i-1 to estimate its value at position increased to the sand content, silt content, soil bulk density, soil microporosity, soil macroporosity, soil water content at permanent wilting point, soil organic carbon and cation exchange capacity variables and decreased to soil water content at field capacity variable after land leveling. Soil land leveling improved the state space model performance for soil organic carbon content, sand content, soil bulk density, soil total porosity and soil water content at field capacity and permanent wilting point variables. The worst state space model performances, after soil land leveling, were found taking silt content, soil microporosity and cation exchange capacity variables as response variables. The best state space model performance, before land leveling, was obtained taking the soil total porosity as response variable.