Abstract
Salinity of soil under the plastic film houses in Korea is known as a significant factor to lower the crop production and to hamper the sustainable agricultural land management. In this study we propose a field monitoring technique to examine the methods applied to minimize the adverse effect of salts in soil based on the relationship between soil electrical characteristics and soil properties. Field experiments for 4 different treatments (water only, fertilizer only, DTPA only, and DTPA and fertilizer together) were conducted on soils at the plastic film house built for cultivating a cucumber plant located at Chunan-si, Chungchungnam-do in Korea. The electrical resistivity was measured by both a dipole-dipole and wenner multi-electrodes array method. After the electrical resistivity measurement we also measured the soil water content, temperature, and electrical conductivity on surface soil. The resulted image of the interpreted resistivity by the inversion technique presented a unique spatial distribution depending on the treatment, implying the effect of the different chemical components. It was also highly suspected that resistivity response changed with the nutrients level, suggesting that our proposed technique could be the effective tool for the monitoring soil water as well as nutrient during the cropping period. Especially, subsoils under DTPA treatment at 40 to 60 cm depth typically presented lower soil water accumulation comparing to subsoils under non-DTPA treatment. It is considered that DTPA resulted in increase of a root water uptake. However, our demonstrated results were mainly based on qualitative comparison. Further experiments need to be conducted to monitor temporal changes of electrical resistivity using time lapse analysis, providing that a plant root activity difference based on changes of soil water and nutrients level in time.
