Effect of Incorporation of Animal Manure Compost on Capillary Rise and Distribution of Cations in Reclaimed Tidal Flat Soils.

The importance of the tidal flat area in Korea is in providing valuable agricultural land resources for additional farmland for food self-sufficiency due to limited arable land resources. But it can’t be directly used as arable land because of salinity caused by capillary rise of highly saline and sodic water from shallow water table as well as lack of adequate water resources for irrigation, requiring reclamation processes to improve physical and chemical properties of the tidal flat soils(RFTS) to be used as arable land. Therefore, we investigated the changes of the height and the velocity of upward movement of water during capillary rise process and total soil water potential(DΨ_t) using soil columns packed with indigenous reclaimed tidal flat soils mixed with oven-dried and ground animal manure and soil blocks consisted of ridges packed with indigenous reclaimed tidal flat soils and furrow packed with various sizes of coal bottom ash as macro porous media as drainage pathway, to verify physical processes of solute movement through macro-porous media packed furrow used for facilitating downward movement of salts in soils and retarding upward movement of salts from shallow groundwater table. The results showed that the capillary rise height was increased with increasing amount of animal manure compost and also the time to reach the maximum faster in a soil column packed with loamy sand than that of sandy loam, indicating the clay content and organic matter content can strongly influence the capillary rise. On other hand, capillary rise was faster at RFTS faced with larger pore size of CBA than reclaimed tidal flats soils faced with smaller size of CBA. Also, the velocity of capillary rise was gradually decreased with increasing height of capillary rise and distance from interface between the macro-porous media and the reclaimed tidal flats soils.

Keyword : Capillary rise, Water movement, Saline-sodic, Reclaimed tidal flat soil