Risk assessment of soil compaction in Walloon Region

peer reviewedIt is well established that soil compaction affects the growth and functioning of roots and disrupts the activity of microfauna and soil microorganisms, resulting in a loss of yields. Agriculture and forestry using increasingly heavy machines, the risk of soil compaction is increasing accordingly. Chosen as indicator of the susceptibility of soils to compaction, the precompression stress (Pc) is calculated using the pedotransfer functions (PTFs) proposed by Horn and Fleige (2003). These PTFs involve eight parameters linked to the hydraulic and mechanical behaviour of soils: organic matter content, bulk density, air capacity, available and non-plant available water capacity, saturated hydraulic conductivity, cohesion and angle of internal friction. The challenge consists in producing Pc maps at the regional scale for Wallonia. Those maps should also be accompanied by estimation uncertainty map. Finally, the results should be exploited to produce compaction risk maps according to various frequent scenarios. In this paper, a methodology is proposed, combining geostatistics and Monte Carlo simulations, to achieve these goals