Use of Two Dimensional Electrical Resistivity Tomography to Identify Soil Water Dynamics and the Effective Plant Root Zone

Abstract

The identification of effective root zone would clarify dynamics of plant available water and soil water balance. Using the relationship between soil properties and electrical resistivity (ER) the purpose of this research is to identify soil zone affected by a plant root activity using electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) technique. Four plastic containers were prepared for two different soil textures (clay and sandy loam) and one container for each texture was selected for planting four corn seedlings (Zea mays L.) and the others were prepared for the blank. For ERT monitoring, we prepared 0.8 m plastic sticks with 17 electrodes installed with 5 cm space. The Ministing (AGI Inc., Texas) instrument for electrical resistivity measurement and semi-auto converter of electrode arrangement were set up for dipole-dipole array. During 2 months of the corns growing, ERT monitoring was made 3 to 4 days after the irrigation practice. Despite of the same amount water supplied into soils, two textures showed very different apparent resistivity values due to different clay content. The apparent electrical resistivity is consistently lower in clay loam comparing to sandy loam soil implying that plant root does not significantly alter the overall trend of resistivity. When plant root system, however, is active both soils with plants showed 2-7 times higher electrical resistivity and higher coefficient variation than soils without plant, implying the effect of root system on the resistivity, in which may caused by . This result suggests plant root activities regulating the soil water dynamics mainly control the variation of electrical resistivity over soil textural difference. Therefore the identification of water uptake zone would highly be correlated to plant root activities, thus ERT will be feasible approach to identify spatial characteristics of a plant root activity.