Effects of layer thickness on desiccation cracking behaviour of a vegetated soil

Abstract

The objective of this study is to explore how different layer thicknesses affect the desiccation cracking behaviour of vegetated soil. During the experiment, an electronic balance was employed to quantify water evaporation, while a digital camera was utilized to capture the initiation and progression of soil surface cracking. Results indicate that in the early drying process, the rate of evapotranspiration in vegetated soil correlates positively with leaf biomass. For soil samples with the same layer thickness, the constant rate stage duration is consistently shorter in vegetated soil samples than in their bare soil counterparts. As the layer thickness increases, both vegetated and bare soil samples crack at higher water content. However, vegetated soil samples crack at lower water content than their bare soil counterparts. Vegetation significantly reduces the soil surface crack ratio and improves the soil crack resistance. The crack reduction ratio is positively correlated with both root weight and length density. In thicker vegetated soil layers, the final surface crack length noticeably declines.

Keywords

Desiccation crack / Vegetated soil / Layer thickness / Root density

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Chaosheng Tang: Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition. Yingdong Gu: Writing - review & editing, Investigation. Lingxin Cui: Investigation, Data curation. Haowen Guo: Writing - review & editing. Congying Li: Writing - original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation. Qing Cheng: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Chaosheng Tang is the Associate Editor for Biogeotechnics and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.

Acknowledgments

This work received generous support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42172290, 42230710, 41925012), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. BK20221250).

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