DETERMINATION OF WATER RETENTION CHARACTERISTICS OF PERLITE AND PEAT

[...]peat mining has been recently questioned because it is harvested from peat lands, highly fragile wetlands ecosystems with a great ecological and archaeological value, included in the list of natural habitats with a potential degradation. According to (Richards 1955), retention curves have great practical and theoretical importance, because they show all important data about water properties and management in soil and substrates. According to (Kutilek and Novak, 1998) the hydrological characteristics such as water retention and the rate of water movement, depend, to a large degree on the total porosity and pore-size distribution of the material. According to the author (Raviv et al., 2002), the total pore space in the plant growth substrates should range from 60-90% by volume.