ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the relationship between soil structure and soil hydraulic properties and how they are affected by soil management. It relates soil structure to hydraulic properties and presents some case studies to demonstrate the effects of soil tillage and aggregation on soil structure. Soil structure is strongly affected by soil management. Characterization of soil structure is based on use of morphological and physical techniques. Soil profile descriptions typically include a field evaluation of soil structure that includes sizes, shapes, and degrees of development of natural aggregates. Equivalent pore-size distributions can be derived from moisture retention data by assuming that soil porosity is composed of bundles of capillary pores of a characteristic range of diameters. Soil porosity can be studied with morphological techniques at different levels of detail. The vertical and horizontal continuity of large pores is an important soil structure characteristic.
