Soil permeability, aggregate stability and root growth: a pot experiment from a soil bioengineering perspective

Assessing the joint development of vegetation cover and soil properties is crucial to evaluate the efficiency of soil bioengineering techniques, especially during the most critical initial phase of vegetation colonization. We set up a laboratory experiment to quantify and disentangle the effect of Alnus incana roots on soil permeability and aggregate stability. Plants were grown in pots in a climate chamber for four different growing periods (1, 2, 4 and 8 months). Pots were filled with a soil coming from a moraine of a landslide area in Central Switzerland. After each growing period, surface permeability, soil volume permeability and soil aggregate stability were measured together with the development of the root systems. Our results show that alder roots significantly improve both surface and whole soil volume permeability already after 2 months of growth. Nevertheless, an increase in root length density does not necessarily correspond to an increase in permeability. We could set as a threshold a root length density of 0.1 cm/cm3 until which an increase in root development corresponds to an increase in soil permeability, whereas after this threshold we observed a decrease in soil permeability. A significant increase in soil aggregate stability could be observed only with a root length density of 2 cm/cm3. No obvious correlation between soil permeability and aggregate stability could be found. Future work should validate these laboratory results with field data. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.