Journal of Water and Soil
Year:2017 | Volume:31 | Issue:1 |Papers Count:28

Introduction: Evaluations show the necessity of using optimization models in order to determine optimal allocation of water in different water conditions. Its use can be proposed according to developed model abilities in this study in order to optimize water productivity and provide sustainable management and development of water resources over irrigation and drainage networks. …

Introduction: The critical role of the rivers in supplying water for various needs of life has led to engineering identification of the hydraulic regime and flow condition of the rivers. Hydraulic structures such dams have inevitable effects on their downstream that should be well investigated. The reservoir dams are the most important hydraulic structures which are the cause of great changes in river flow conditions. …

Introduction: In alluvial streams, water flow affects the sediment and transports them to the downstream constantly. In the meantime, bed forms will be created on stream bed with various dimensions and in different conditions. In this paper experiments have been done to study the influences of width reduced transitions on the height of ripple forms. …

Introduction: Groundwater is the most important resource of providing sanitary water for potable and household consumption. So continuous monitoring of groundwater level will play an important role in water resource management. But because of the large amount of information, evaluation of water table is a costly and time consuming process. Therefore, in many studies, the data and information aren’t suitable and useful and so, must be neglected. The PCA technique is an optimized mathematical method that reserve data with the highest share in affirming variance with recognizing less important data and limits the original variables into to a few components. In this technique, variation factors called principle components are identified with considering data structures. Thus, variables those have the highest correlation coefficient with principal components are extracted as a result of identifying the components that create the greatest variance. …

Introduction: After wheat, rice and corn, potato is the fourth most important food plant in the world. In comparison with other species, potato is very sensitive to water stress because of its shallow root system: approximately 85% of the root length is concentrated in the upper 0.3-0.4 m of the soil. Several studies showed that drip irrigation is an effective method for enhancing potato yield. Fabeiro et al. (2001) concluded that tuber bulking and ripening stages were found to be the most sensitive stages of water stress with drip irrigation. Water deficit occurring in these two growth stages could result in yield reductions. Wanget al. (2006) investigated the effects of drip irrigation frequency on soil wetting pattern and potato yield. ...

Introduction: Dynamic nature of hydrological phenomena and the limited availability of appropriate mathematical tools caused the most previous studies in this field led to the random and the probabilistic approach. So selection the best model for evaluation of these phenomena is essential and complex. Nowadays different models are used for evaluation and prediction of hydrological phenomena. Damle and Yalcin (2007) estimated river runoff by chaos theory. khatibi et al (2012) used artificial neural network and gene expression programming to predict relative humidity. Zounemat and Kisi (2015) evaluated chaotic behavior of marine windwave system of Caspian sea. One of the important hydrological phenomena is evaporation, especially in lakes.The investigation of deterministic and stochastic behavior of water evaporation values in the lakes in order to select the best simulation approach and capable of prediction is an important and controversial issue that has been studied in this research. ...

Introduction: Rock fragments on soil surfaces can also have several contrasting effects on the hydraulics of overland flow and soil erosion processes. Many investigators have found that a cover of rock fragments on a soil surface can decrease its erosion potential compared to bare soil surface (1, 12 and 18). This has mainly been attributed to the protection of the soil surface by rock fragments against the beating action of rain. This leads to a decrease in the intensity of surface sealing, an increase in the infiltration rate, a decrease in the runoff volume and rate, and, hence, a decrease in sediment generation and production for soils covered by rock fragments. …

Introduction: Chemical pollution of surface water is one of the serious issues that threaten the quality of water. This would be more important when the surface waters used for human drinking supply. One of the key parameters used to measure water pollution is BOD. Because many variables affect the water quality parameters and a complex nonlinear relationship between them is established conventional methods can not solve the problem of quality management of water resources. …

Introduction: Outer bank region is always exposed to destruction and scour due to secondary flow. Different methods are generally used to protect the outer bank. One of the most common and economical ways is spur dike. As an obstacle in the flow, spur dikes protect the outer bank through decreasing the velocity and forming vortexes between them and as a result sedimentation along that area. However, the spur dike increases the shear stress and local scour around the spur, especially its nose.. This study investigates the scour hole dimensions around three types of spur dike including permeable, impermeable and bandal-like spur dike which is done as a combination of permeable and impermeable spur dike. …

Introduction: In current situation when world is facing massive population, producing enough food and adequate income for people is a big challenge specifically for governors. This challenge gets even harder in recent decades, due to global population growth which was projected to increase to 7.8 billion in 2025.Agriculture as the only industry that has ability to produce food is consuming 90 percent of fresh water globally.Despite of increasing for food demand, appropriate agricultural land and fresh water resources are restricted. To solve this problem, one is to increase water productivity which can be obtain by irrigation. …

Introduction: Agricultural activity in Varamin plain has been faced with many challenges in recent years, due to vicinity to Tehran the capital of Iran (competition for Latian dam reservoir), and competition with Tehran south network in allocation of Mamlou dam reservoir and treated wastewater of south wastewater treatment plant. Mamlou and Latian dam reservoirs, due to increase of population and industry sectors, allocated to urban utilization of Tehran. Based on national policy, the treated wastewater should be replaced with Latian dam reservoir water to supply water demand of agricultural sector. …

Introduction: Plants can uptake, bioaccumulate and immobilize different metals in their tissues.Phytoremediation technique has been used to remove hazardous substances including heavy metals from the environment. Assisted phytoremediation is usually the process of applying a chemical additive to heavy metal contaminated soils to enhance the metal uptake by plants. The main objective of present study was to investigate the effectiveness of plant growth regulators (PGRs) and a humic substance (HS) on Ni phytoremediation by maize in a Ni-pollutrd calcareous soil. …

Introduction: Water shortage in arid and semiarid regions is the most serious factor in limiting agricultural activities as it leads to the rapid reduction of yields from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Under conditions of water scarcity, leaf temperature rises, which causes plant wilting and premature senescence of leaves and, eventually, severes reduction of dry matter production. Use of high-efficient irrigation practices, improvement of soil's physical properties, and use of soil amendments such as superabsorbent polymers are some ways of compensating for water shortage, especially during the growing season. …

Introduction: Land application of organic wastes and biosolids such as municipal sewage sludge has been an important and attractive practice for improving different properties of agricultural soils with low organic matter content in semi-arid regions, due to an increase of soil organic matter level and fertility. However, application of this organic waste may directly or indirectly affect soil bio-indicators such as microbial and enzymatic activities through a change in the activity of other soil organisms such as earthworms. Earthworms are the most important soil saprophagous fauna and much of the faunal biomass is attributed to the presence of these organisms in the soil. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the effect of earthworm activity on soil microbial and biochemical attributes, in particularly when soils are amended with urban sewage sludge. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the earthworm effects on biochemical and microbiological properties of a calcareous soil amended with municipal sewage sludge using Factor Analysis (FA).

Introduction: Natural environments, including soils and sediments, are open and complex systems in which physico-chemical reactions are in semi equilibrium state. In these systems, bioavailability of plant nutrients, like phosphate, is influenced by environmental conditions and concentrations of other ions such as calcium and magnesium. Magnesium is a dominant cation in irrigation water and in the soil solution of calcareous soils.Recent evidences show relative increase in the concentration of magnesium in irrigation water. …

Introduction: In recent years, because of the presence of industrial factories around the Isfahan province of Iran and high concentrations of heavy metals in the vicinity of them, and the gradual accumulation of heavy metals from various sources of pollution in urban areas over time, including gasoline combustion, and use of urban waste compost and sewage sludge as fertilizer, there has been widespread concerned regarding the human health problems with increasing heavy metals in soils around the Isfahan city. The variation of composition in the soil matrix may lead to variation of composition and behavior of soil heavy metals. …

Introduction: Soils form from the interplay of five main factors namely parent material, time, climate, relief (topography) and organisms. Topography is one of the local factors that has direct and indirect effects on soil formation, physical and chemical properties of soils. To understand the mutual relationship between topographic properties, soil properties and plant community (phytocoenosis), it is necessary to decide on the appropriate method for properly managing the soil resources. In addition to the soil properties, topography may affect the soil production indices as well. Soil production index and consequently its productivity will in turn affect the growth and fruiting. Insight about the pattern the spatial variability of soil properties can be used to manage the lands properly. This study was performed to investigate the spatial variability of soil properties regarding aspect and also the relationship of these changes with the quality and quantity of peach production in Saman region in Chaharmahal-Va-Bakhtiari province, Iran. …

Introduction: Soil water erosion on the slope lands involves detachment, transport and deposition of soil materials due to erosive forces of raindrops and surface runoff. Surface runoff can produce relatively high soil loss and is often the dominant hillslope erosion process. The rate of surface runoff which controls surface erosion on the uniform areas in the hillsolpes, is dependent on rainfall intensity and slope steepness. In various studies, the relationships between rainfall characteristics and surface runoff were well known. Many studies have been performed on the relationship between runoff and rainfall characteristics and soil loss. …

Introduction: Effective and sustainable soil management requires knowledge about the spatial patterns of soil variation and soil surveys are important and useful sources of data that can be used. Prior knowledge about the spatial distribution of the soils is the first essential step for this aim but this requires the collection of large amounts of soil information. However, the conventional soil surveys are usually not useful for providing quantitative information about the spatial distribution of soil properties that are used in many environmental studies. …

Introduction: Some methods of contaminated soils remediation reduces the mobile fraction of trace elements, which could contaminate groundwater or be taken up by soil organisms. Cadmium (Cd) as a heavy metal has received much attention in the past few decades due to its potential toxic impact on soil organism activity and compositions. Cadmium is a soil pollutant of no known essential biological functions, and may pose threats to soil-dwelling organisms and human health. Soil contamination with Cd usually originates from mining and smelting activities, atmospheric deposition from metallurgical industries, incineration of plastics and batteries, land application of sewage sludge, and burning of fossil fuels. Heavy metal immobilization using amendments is a simple and rapid method for the reduction of heavy metal pollution. One way of the assessment of contaminated soils is sequential extraction procedure. …

Introduction: sustainable development and the environment are interconnected. Sustainable agriculture is continuous utilization of a farm with respect to various aspects of environmental conditions by using fewer inputs (other than Bio-fertilizers). Phosphorus is one of the essential elements for the plants. Management of soil is possible by using biological fertilizers pillar of sustainable agriculture and providing some of the phosphorus needed by plants via bio-fertilizers. …

Introduction: World's population growth and limited water resources and needing to more food production led to interest farmers to use nitrogen fertilizer more than soil requires and subsequently Nitrate leaching causes groundwater and environmental pollution. Therefore, researches has concentrated on improvement of nitrogen use efficiency, which numerical simulation is the effective solutions to optimize the management of water and fertilizer in the field in order to achieve the maximal yield and minimal nitrate pollution of soil, groundwater and drainage in water deficiency crisis condition. For this reason, the evaluation of new user friendly models in correct estimation of soil moisture and nitrogen content distribution and recognition of water and solutes movement in the soil and choosing the best management option for increasing productivity and economic performance and also reduction of nitrate pollution of soil and ground water source with the least limitations and high accuracy is necessary. ...

Introduction: Land suitability evaluation is a process to examine the degree of land fitness for specific utilization and also makes it possible to estimate land productivity potential. In 1976, FAO provided a general framework for land suitability classification. It has not been proposed a specific method to perform this classification in the framework. In later years, a collection of methods was presented based on the FAO framework. In parametric method, different land suitability aspects are defined as completely discrete groups and are separated from each other by distinguished and consistent ranges. …

Introduction: Selecting the right source of nutrient in a particular cropping situation requires a consideration of economic, environmental, and social objectives. One of the objectives is to keep all nutrient losses to a minimum. Since the use of nitrogen chemical fertilizers began more than 100 years ago, it has been recognized that it can be lost as gaseous ammonia when an ammonical fertilizer is applied to calcareous soil. A process by which nitrogen exit from the soil in form of ammonia and enter to the atmosphere is called volatilization.Agricultural practices (use of chemical and animal fertilizers) are known as major sources of ammonia volatilization into the atmosphere. Nitrogen losses not only economically but also in terms of environment pollution is important.

Introduction: Amongst different habitats, fire is an ecological factor and determinant that affects many physico-chemical soil factors. In addition, among natural disturbances, fire plays an important role in plant diversity conservation and in some areas around the world, the presence of some plant species depends on natural fire. The extension of fire influences on soil is related to the fire severity. In fact, fire severity encompasses of two characteristics: extension and time of burning. On the other hand, fire extension and burning time are affected by humidity, air temperature, wind speed, topographical characteristics. Despite high frequency of fire in natural habitats and high level of fire effectiveness on soil parameters, study of fire impacts on soil characteristics were rarely reported in Iran. In addition, most previous studies were conducted in forest habitats, ignoring the severity of fire on soil. …

Introduction: The analysis of extreme events such as first frost dates are detrimental phenomena which influence in various branches of engineering, such as agriculture. The analysis and probability predicting of these events can decrease damage of agriculture, horticulture and the others. Furthermore, this phenomenon can have a relation with other thermal indexes. The analyzing of first frost dates of all synoptic stations of Khorasan Razavi province is subject of this article. The frequency analysis applied to eight distributions. Then the relationship between first frost dates and thermal index were studied. Best relation was between minimum temperature and return periods of first frost dates. …

Introduction: Solar radiation on the earth surface has a wide range of applications in hydrology, agriculture and meteorology. Solar radiation is an important parameter of estimated models of reference crop potential evapotranspiration such as the Penman–Monteith equation. Also, total sunshine hours are one of the most important factors affecting climate and environment, and its long-term variation is of much concern in climate studies. Reference crop potential evapotranspiration is one of the most important parts of water cycle in the nature but, direct measurement of this crop parameter is so difficult and not practical. Therefore, equations that can estimate the value of evapotranspiration only by using meteorological data are necessary. …

Introduction: The range of meteorological parameters, such as temperature, are different at different scales.Fractal geometry is a branch of mathematics that has many applications in the field of discrete and continuous domains. Downscaling may be done by different methods, including univariate, multivariate regression functions, splined function and fractal function. Finding the best model for fractal downscaling, is needed to implement the distance between measured and modeled data sets. This distance may be estimated by different methods, including Euclidian. For temporal downscaling, the data are two-dimensional, i.e. time and that of principal variable (e.g. temperatures). …