Design and Construction of Repacked Soil Columns for Measuring Solute Transport, Plant Growth and Soil Biota

Background

Soil columns play important roles in experimental set up for monitoring the fate and mobility of solutes such as contaminants and nutrients. They are also used in evaluating solute transport models. Soil columns are used widely in studies on the fate and transport of nutrients, pesticides, microbes, and heavy metals (Lewis and Sjöstrom, 2010).

Specifically, soil columns have been used in several studies including leaching of pharmaceuticals (Oppel et al., 2004), response of root growth to soil compaction levels (Tracy et al., 2012), dissolved organic carbon and nitrate fluxes (Eykelbosh et al., 2015), fate of organic micropollutants (Banzhaf and Hebig, 2016), and modelling of micropollutants to simulate riverbank filtration (Bertelkamp et al., 2016).

The experimental setup has a great influence on the outcome of soil column studies (Bromly et al., 2007). Therefore, it is very vital to design soil columns in such a way as to overcome associated challenges and minimize any potential source of bias (Weihermuller et al., 2007). The purpose of this protocol is to provide a step-by-step guidance in the construction and use of repacked soil columns to obtain reproducible experimental outcomes.