Fragipan Influence On Hydropedological Properties of Benchmark Soilscapes in West Virginia.

Soil wetness and the interactions between soil and water influence the potential uses of soil and must be considered when making decisions regarding soil use and management. The strategic placement of hydrologic monitoring instrumentation on a benchmark soilscape is critical toward providing the users of soil information with reliable predictability of water movement at the soil-water interface. A hydropedologically significant study site that satisfies the benchmark soilscape criteria as defined by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) was selected for this research. Because of the high cost of performing investigations and research, benchmark soils are targeted and the information gleaned from those studies is extrapolated to other like regions. The area of this research consists of a 53 ha catchment located approximately 15 km east of Morgantown, West Virginia in Coopers Rock State Forest. The catchment is in a mature deciduous forest in Major Land Resource Area 127. Piezometric data confirm that the depth to the water is consistent with the first encounter of redoximorphic depletions as identified in the soil profile descriptions. Results reveal that water is present in the layer immediately above the fragipan zone at all hillslope locations with the exception of the backslope, at which results are mixed and can be attributed to the sub-landforms commonly encountered across the backslope. As hypothesized, the footslope location exhibits a higher frequency and duration of saturation than any other position on the hillslope.