Soil Health Impacts on Water Storage & Hydraulic Conductivity
How do soil texture, bulk density (compaction), and organic matter control how much water a soil can store and transmit? Increasing soil organic matter and decompacting disturbed soils are two proven outcomes in soil restoration and both benefit soil hydrology.
These pages turn the USDA ROSETTA3 pedotransfer functions into interactive charts you can explore in your browser. They also blend in findings from Minasny & McBratney (2018) on how much soil organic matter affects water storage. Drag the sliders to change bulk density or organic matter and watch porosity, plant-available water, and infiltration respond.
TipHow to explore
Every chart is live: drag the sliders (bulk density, organic matter) and hover for exact values; use the toolbar to zoom and pan. Grey, dashed regions flag texture and bulk-density values outside of the models calibration.
Soil health at a glance: how compaction & organic matter change water storage
Drag the two sliders — bulk density (compaction) and organic matter — and watch the soil-water graph respond. Easing compaction and adding organic matter increase both plant-available and drainable water storage capacity. The table below the chart also responds to the sliders, providing soil water retention values.
Figure axis is in inches per foot of soil depth; the table lists the same quantities as volume fraction (cm³/cm³).
The notebooks
Three visualizations were developed from published models, including ROSETTA3 from Zhang & Schaap (2017) to estimate saturated hydraulic conductivity in soil; Minasny & McBratney (2018), a study of empirical soil water holding capacity vs organic matter content in soil; and Saxton & Rawls (2006), who developed soil water relationships for texture and organic matter. These visualizations were developed in Jupyter Notebooks, available in the soil-health-hydraulics GitHub repository and viewable here.
1 · Porosity by texture & bulk density
Total porosity, field capacity, and wilting point for every USDA texture class across bulk densities 0.8–1.9 g/cm³. Includes plant-available and drainable water in inches per foot of soil, plus an FAO-style storage diagram. The foundation for the other two notebooks.
2 · Organic-matter effects
How adding organic matter (0–8%, up to 15%) shifts available and drainable water, via empirical methods: Rosetta3 (Zhang & Schaap, 2017), Minasny & McBratney (2018), and Saxton & Rawls (2006), with a texture-based porosity calibration from the UNSODA empirical database (Nemes, et al., 2001).
3 · Conductivity & infiltration
Saturated hydraulic conductivity, Ksat, unsaturated hydraulic conductivity, K(h) from the Mualem–van Genuchten curve, and Green–Ampt infiltration rates, in units of inches per hour (in/hr), with sliders to alter bulk-density.
What’s behind the numbers
All results come from the Rosetta v3 pedotransfer functions, which predict van Genuchten–Mualem water-retention and conductivity parameters from sand/silt/clay percentages and bulk density. Texture classes use representative median sand/silt/clay values. See the individual notebooks for full methodology, assumptions, and caveats, or the project README for an overview.
These are model estimates for matrix (non-macropore) flow, intended for relative comparison and planning. They are not a substitute for site-specific measurements.