Absence of preferential flow in the percolating waters of a coniferous forest soil

Evidence for the functioning of macropores and the presence of preferential flow in forest soils is equivocal. This is partly because many workers use only one diagnostic technique to indicate whether or not macropore flow occurs. In this paper three lines of evidence are used to suggest that preferential flow does not occur in the percolating waters of a coniferous forest soil under the range of hydrological conditions that prevail in the field. To simulate field conditions, realistic rainfall intensities were used in conservative solute transport experiments on four undisturbed soil columns. A method is described in which breakthrough data can be used to calculate the percentage of antecedent water displaced from a soil column during frontal-type breakthrough experiments. Calculations based on this method using the experimental data show that as little as five percent of the antecedent water was immobile, The simple form of the functional advection-dispersion equation, based on a single value for linear velocity and the dispersion coefficient was fitted to two of the breakthrough curves with reasonable accuracy, further suggesting that preferential flow did not occur in the experiments. Finally, soil moisture characteristic curves were determined for replicate soil samples from the forest soil. The operational water contents of the columns during the breakthrough experiments were compared with the soil moisture characteristics and it was found that pores exerting pressure heads greater than -0.5 kPa did not appear to contribute to flow through the columns, again suggesting an absence of preferential flow. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.