A High‐Resolution Surface Mapping Procedure for Soil Cores Using Computed Tomography Scanning Data

Abstract

High-resolution mapping of the soil surface provides insight regarding gas and water transport at the soil-atmosphere interface and biogeochemical reactions occurring in soil pores connected to the atmosphere. A new procedure for high-resolution soil mapping was tested in undisturbed cores (15-cm diameter) with images constructed from X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning. Our procedure includes detecting boundaries at the soil-air interface, edge cleaning, and removal of artifacts by use of a moving window with optimized size. We tested the procedure on three undisturbed soil cores from an agricultural field: (i) without introduced earthworms vs. in which earthworms of (ii) smaller (Aporrectodea turgida Eisen) or (iii) larger (Lumbricus terrestris L.) size were introduced and resided for 28 d. Soil surface maps were produced at a scale of 0.35-by 0.35-mm pixels, with gray tones reflecting lower to higher elevation. This work has implications for describing pore connectivity and interpreting greenhouse gas fluxes from the soil. Citation: Han, L., J.K. Whalen, and P. Dutilleul. 2017. A high-resolution surface mapping procedure for soil cores using computed tomography scanning data. Vadose Zone J. 16(6).

A novel 3D volumetric method for directly quantifying porosity and pore space morphology in flocculated suspended sediments

“…BoneJ is a plugin within ImageJ that was designed for use on bone structure in biological sciences [60] , but the principles and methods have been applied to soils [43 , 61 , 62] and by extension can be applied to porous sediments. MorphoLibJ is a suite of mathematically derived morphology methods, designed specifically for use in ImageJ, and has been previously applied to soil structures [63] . For 3D data presentation, Drishti [64] was used, but other visualisation tools are available that may be better suited to different research presentation needs or sample types.…”