Effect of Composted Wood Barks (CWBs) on Some Soil Physical and Hydraulic Properties

Soil is the main place for storage of water needed for plants. Enhancing of water storage capacity and its infiltration into the soils is one of the best methods for optimization using of water resources in agricultural activities. Addition or incorporation of any type of organic matter into the soil, will leads to increase of suitable soil water content needed for crop farming as a result of increasing of water holding capacity. For achieving to this issue, a laboratory experiment was conducted in the statistical method of factorial design with the basis of randomized complete block to evaluate the effectiveness of applying wastes of wood on some soil physical and hydraulic characteristics. Wood wastes were prepared from a wood and paper production factory (Chooka) in north area of Iran. These materials after long years of repletion and fermentation in their storage were converted to the form of composted wood barks (CWBs). These materials were incorporated in four levels including 0, 1, 2.5 and 5 percentages with the soils having clay and sandy loam texture. The concerned properties are bulk density, porosity, saturated hydraulic conductivity, water percentage in different pressures (soil water content), and water holding capacity or total available water (TAW). Also, the soil moisture retention curve was obtained using available data for all treatments. Results showed that all treatments had significant effect (p<0.05) on decreasing soil bulk density in the sandy loam soil while non of the percentages of CWBs had no significant effect on decreasing bulk density in the clay soil. In contrast, all treatments had significant effect (P<0.05) on hydraulic conductivity, porosity, mass wetness, total available water in clay soil and all of treatment had no influence on this characteristics for sandy loam soil. Also, that incorporation of CWBs into the soil increased macro pores both in clay and sandy loam soils.