3D soil void space lacunarity as an index of degradation after land use change

Abstract

In this work, lacunarity analysis is performed on soil pores segmented by the pure voxel extraction method from soil tomography images. The conversion of forest to sugarcane plantation was found to result in higher sugarcane soil pore lacunarity than that of native forest soil, while the porosity was found to be lower. More precisely, this study shows that native forest has more porous soil with a more uniform spatial distribution of pores, while sugarcane soil has lower porosity and a more heterogeneous pore distribution. Moreover, validation through multivariate statistics demonstrates that lacunarity can be considered a relevant index of clustering and can explain the variability among soils under different land use systems. While porosity by itself represents a fundamental concept for quantification of the impact of land use change, the current findings demonstrate that the spatial distribution of pores also plays an important role and that pore lacunarity can be adopted as a complementary tool in studies directed at quantifying the effect of human intervention on soils.

Quantifying Soil Complexity Using Fisher Shannon Method on 3D X-ray Computed Tomography Scans

“…These properties include isotropy, homogeneity, complexity, and the hierarchical fractal (or multifractal) organization of soil constituents, contributing to a deeper understanding of soil's physical, chemical, and biological processes [14]. X-ray CT scans have already been studied to characterize the pores' spatial distribution, revealing extraordinary complexity of the pore space [15][16][17][18]. The complexity of soil structure has also been addressed through methods based on concepts from statistical physics and information theory, such as fractals and multifractals [19][20][21], information content [22] and complex networks [23,24].…”