Water balance and leaching of dissolved organic and inorganic carbon of eroded Luvisols using high precision weighing lysimeters

Scales of Water Retention Dynamics Observed in Eroded Luvisols from an Arable Postglacial Soil Landscape

“…The soil profile truncation was assumed to correspond with the erosion by tillage and water manifested by the absence of some diagnostic horizon and a reduced thickness of the clay‐illuviation (Bt) horizon. Herbrich et al (2017) observed widely scattered paired values of suction and volumetric water content in eroded Luvisols that deviated from retention curves of soil cores measured in the laboratory. These differences could hardly be explained by a spatial heterogeneity of texture and bulk density (e.g., Gerke and Hierold, 2012).…”

“…The lysimeters, three from each site, were arranged around a central belowground service access pit in alternating sequence (i.e., Dd_1, Hd_2, Dd_3, Hd_4, Dd_5, Hd_6) according to standard TERENO SoilCan lysimeter design (Pütz et al, 2016). Note that this notation was used to combine the origin of the soils with its specific position in the particular lysimeter arrangement (c.f., Herbrich et al, 2017).…”

“…Soil bulk density, ρ b (g cm −3 ), was gravimetrically determined on the 100‐cm 3 soil cores after oven drying at 105°C for >24 h. The porosity (ε), of the soil (cm 3 cm −3 ) was calculated as where ρ s is the particle density (g cm −3 ); here, a value of ρ s = 2.64 g cm −3 for quartz was assumed. Information on physical and chemical soil properties and crop and soil management was reported by Herbrich et al (2017) to March 2014. In the period beginning April 2014, Persian clover ( Trifolium resupinatum L.) and then winter wheat ( Triticum aestivum L.) were cultivated.…”

“…Thus, inverse modeling techniques have been proposed that estimate soil hydraulic parameters by optimizing the fit of model predictions to measured field data (e.g., Vrugt et al, 2008). The inverse estimation of soil hydraulic parameters requires information on fluxes at the upper and lower boundaries that can especially be provided by high‐resolution weighing lysimeters (e.g., Herbrich and Gerke, 2016; Herbrich et al, 2017). The conditions can be even better determined if lysimeters are equipped with soil water content and matric suction sensors such as in the case of the TERENO (TERrestrial ENvironmental Observatories) SoilCan lysimeters (Pütz et al, 2016).…”

Response to Referee #2's comments on "Comparing soil carbon loss through respiration and leaching under extreme precipitation events in arid and semi-arid grasslands"

“…Respiration and leaching are two main processes responsible for soil carbon loss. While respiration has received considerable research attention (Raich and Schlesinger, 1992;Raich and Potter, 1995;Hoover et al, 2016;Burri et al, 2015;Escolar et al, 2015), leaching is relatively poorly constrained despite its importance in certain ecosystems (Cole et al, 2007;Battin et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2017). For instance, soil carbon leached from forests, grasslands, and croplands is estimated to be 15.…”