Biochar changes how water flows through soil Rice University rightOriginal StudyPosted by Jade Boyd-Rice on September 25 2014New research could help settle the debate about one of biochar s biggest benefits �its seemingly contradictory ability to make clay soils drain faster and sandy soils drain slower.As more gardeners and farmers add ground charcoal or biochar to soil to both boost crop yields and counter global climate change the study offers the first detailed explanation for this mystery.�Understanding the controls on water movement through biochar-amended soils is critical to explaining other frequently reported benefits of biochar such as nutrient retention carbon sequestration and reduced greenhouse gas emissions� says lead author Rebecca Barnes an assistant professor of environmental science at Colorado College who began the research as a postdoctoral research associate at Rice University.Biochar can be produced from waste wood manure or leaves and its popularity among DIY types and gardening buffs took off after archaeological studies found that biochar added to soils in the Amazon more than 1000 years ago was still improving the water- and nutrient-holding abilities of those poor soils today.Studies over the past decade have found that biochar soil amendments can either increase or decrease the amount of water that soil holds but it has been tough for experts to explain why this occurs due partly to conflicting results from many different field tests.In the new study biogeochemists at Rice conducted side-by-side tests of the water-holding ability of three soil types �sand clay and topsoil �both with and without added biochar.The biochar used in the experiments derived from Texas mesquite wood was prepared to exacting standards in the lab of Rice geochemist Caroline Masiello a study coauthor to ensure comparable results across soil types.�Not all biochar is created equal and one of the important lessons of recent studies is that the hydrological properties of biochar can vary widely depending on the temperature and time in the reactor� Masiello says.�It s important to use the right recipe for the biochar that you want to make and the differences can be subtle. For scientific studies it is critical to make sure you re comparing apples to apples.�Barnes says the team chose to make its comparison with simple relatively homogenous soil materials to compare results to established hydrologic models that relate water flow to a soil s physical properties like bulk density and porosity.�This is what helped us explain the seeming disconnect that people have noted when amending soils with biochar� she says. �Biochar is light and highly porous. When biochar is added to clay it makes the soil less dense and it increases hydraulic conductivity which makes intuitive sense.�Adding biochar to sand also makes it less dense so one would expect that soil to drain more quickly as well; but in fact researchers have found that biochar-amended sand holds water longer.�Study coauthor Brandon Dugan assistant professor of Earth science at Rice says �We hypothesize that this is likely due to the presence of two flow paths for water through soil-biochar mixtures. One pathway is between the soil and biochar grains and a second pathway is water moving through the biochar itself.�Barnes says the highly porous structure of biochar makes each of these pathways more tortuous than the pathway that water would take through sand alone. Moreover the surface chemistry of biochar �both on external surfaces and inside pores �is likely to promote absorption and further slow the movement of water.�By adding our results to the growing body of literature we show that when biochar is added to sand or other coarse-grained soils there is a simultaneous decrease in bulk density and hydraulic conductivity as opposed to the expected result of decreased bulk density correlated with increased hydraulic conductivity that has been observed for other soil types� Barnes says.Study coauthors include co-first author Morgan Gallagher a former Rice graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Rice and an associate in research at Duke University s Center for Global Change and Rice graduate student Zuolin Liu. The findings appear in PLOS ONE.Source: Rice UniversityYou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.