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Soil management principles in climate-smart conservation <BR>agriculture to halt and reverse land degradation (Communication session)

EUROSOIL2020CONT-1996

IMPACT OF DIFFERENT TILLAGE METHODS ON THE SOIL WATER CONTENT – AN AUSTRIAN CASE STUDY

Angelika Xaver^{1, 2}, Taru Sandén², Anna Wawra², Oliver Alber³, Georg Dersch², Johannes Hösch², Andreas Baumgarten², Heide Spiegel^{* 2}

¹Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation, TU Wien, ²Department for Soil Health and Plant Nutrition, AGES, Vienna, ³Department for Data, Statistics and Risk Assessment, AGES, Graz, Austria

Content: Water plays a vital role in agriculture, from germination and growth to plant health and yield. Thus, understanding the impact of different soil management techniques, in particular tillage methods, on the soil water content is of utmost importance. Especially in the light of a changing climate and the predicted accumulation of extreme weather events, such as heat waves and droughts. Although tillage in general aims to optimize soil conditions to allow for an ideal plant growth and production, conventional tillage may have also less desirable effects, e.g. soil compaction, erosion, etc. Consequently, conservation tillage gains popularity and its effects on soil and plant parameters are extensively tested.

Since 1988, the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES) runs a field experiment to study the impacts of different tillage systems on chemical, physical and microbial soil parameters as well as on crop parameters. The three different tillage treatments include conventional tillage, reduced tillage, and minimum tillage. The long-term field experiment is situated in the Austrian Marchfeld region, which is often referred to as Austria’s granary. The study site is situated in the Pannonian climate, the soil is classified as a fine-sandy loamy Haplic Chernozem. While the long-term development of the soil organic matter content and various nutrients has been investigated, continuous observations of the soil water content were not feasible so far. In autumn 2018, the installation of 27 soil moisture sensors became possible through the use of low-cost sensor technology, provided by the European citizen science project GROW Observatory (GROW; https://growobservatory.org/). Continuous data records have been collected over an entire growing season and are still being collected. The main crop was winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and the catch crop white mustard (Sinapis alba L.).

In this study, we aim to quantify the impact of different tillage systems on the soil water content. For an in-depth analysis the relationship between the tillage methods and the auto-correlated soil moisture time series is determined by applying a linear model with an autoregressive covariance structure for longitudinal data. In addition, we investigate soil parameters as governing parameters and utilize air temperature and precipitation to identify periods of extreme weather events, e.g. heat waves, which are given special consideration. Preliminary results show the highest soil water content in the minimum tillage plots which underpins the importance of conservation agriculture in our changing climate.

This study was funded by the GROW Observatory project of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (https://growobservatory.org/).

Disclosure of Interest: None Declared

Keywords: conservation agriculture, low-cost sensors, soil moisture, tillage intensity