Designed for undergraduate and graduate students, this book covers important soil physical properties, critical physical processes involving energy and mass transport, movement and retention of water and solutes through soil profile, soil temperature regimes and aeration, and plant-water relations. It includes new concepts and numerical examples for an in depth understanding of these principles. The book provides readers with clear coverage of how and why water and solute flow through the soil and details how various factors influence the flow. It includes guidance on the use of the existing public domain computer models.
Table of Contents:
Introduction to Soil Physics. Units and Dimensions. Characteristics of soils of the vadose zone. Sampling concepts and designs. Spatial variability of vadose zone properties. Fundamentals of hydrology. Water in vadose zone. Flow through the vadose zone. Infiltration into vadose zone water. Chemical transport through vadose zone. Energy flow through vadose zone. Air flow through vadose zone. Application of Special Topics
About the Author :
Manoj K. Shukla
Review :
"This book updates the always emerging list of topics in soil physics for undergraduate and graduate students. ... Certainly, this new book is not only a helpful source for students to develop knowledge in Soil Physics but also for scientists whose background is in the related soil sciences and agronomic disciplines, in hydrology, climatology, geology, biology, plant sciences and even spatial statistics and for all those who appreciate the benefits for their own disciplines resulting from knowing and applying soil physical concepts. This book reaches out to all these related disciplines to stimulate multidisciplinary research and to build knowledge from integrated approaches."
—Ole Wendroth, University of Kentucky
"This new soil physics textbook takes a refreshing approach in that it covers a variety of topics that should be appealing to scientists and engineers interested in water flow, heat flow, air flow, and chemical transport in soils. It has also incorporated soil sampling techniques and soil spatial and temporal variability. The fundamentals of flow and transport are well covered. In addition, the book presents several computer models involving flow and transport and it contains many examples and problems. This latest textbook makes a welcome addition to the already available textbooks in soil physics."
—Jacob Dane, Auburn University
"The book is a comprehensive overview of all relevant topics related to processes in soil. It accounts for new developments in teaching and brings in new research findings as well. The undergraduate and graduate students are guided through the basics of soil science to field investigations and simulation applications. To cover soil physics in one book justifies the volume of 445 pages, but since the book is written in a good readable style students would perhaps like to read even more."
––Willibald Loiskandl,
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna
"This book provides an excellent coverage of soil physical processes ranging from fundamentals of process description to some of the advanced experimental and modeling techniques. This systematically organized e-book serves as a good reference for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as practitioners engaged in soil and water resources"
—Binayak Mohanty, Texas A&M University
"… Dr. Shukla presents the reader with an introduction to the soil physical principles that come to bear in such an integrated scientific approach, as well as introducing us to applications by way of various available state-of-the-art models, in a hydrologic context. As expected when taking such a broad approach, much of the relevant material will have to be borrowed from materials by others. Dr. Shukla is to be commended for putting such diverse material together in a comprehensive text.
—Jan W Hopmans, University of California
"… a useful source of information for researchers or practitioners in such subjects as civil engineering, water resources (including irrigation) planning, and ecological conservation. It makes a welcome link to hydrology and the area of land–surface–atmosphere exchange, and as a result is rather different from other available texts on soil physics, but the coverage of these topics could have been much more complete and accurate. … carefully laid out and provides a very comprehensive and generally well-structured overview of all processes … Would I recommend this book to my students or scientists and practitioners in my network? I most certainly would"
—A. Verhoef, in the European Journal of Soil Science, July 2014
