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EA3007/5018 Field Studies in Land and Water Science Assignment - James Cook University, Australia

Effect of land characteristics and management on water quality

You are involved in a project monitoring the contribution of runoff from sugarcane farms to nutrient load in a catchment. First you need to find out something about the soil types involved.

Soil types

1. Open Queensland Globe, tick the acknowledgments box and the 'Get started' button.

2. Zoom in to the Cairns region using your mouse buttons and wheel or the buttons at the bottom right of the screen.

3. Click 'Layers' in the panel on the left, then click 'Add layers +'

4. Scroll down to 'Geoscientific information' and click the down arrow next to it.

5. Scroll down to 'Soil mapping and sites' and click the down arrow next to it

6. Click the box 'Soils -1:50,000 scale' (this is the most detailed general soil map for this area)

7. Go to one of the sets of the coordinates in Table 1 (If you did the class exercise you will already have filled in the left side of the table). The coordinates are shown in the bottom left corner of the map window. Zoom in to the area of interest and you might need to be patient with the view refreshing and with the coordinates keeping up with your cursor movements.

8. Once you have found the map polygon in which the location is situated, click the blue spanner symbol at the top right corner of the map, then click the 'i' symbol for 'Identify'. Then click on the polygon ('unique mapping area') of interest.

9. In the left-hand panel you will see 'Soils of the Babinda Cairns Area BBC'. Click on the arrow next, then click on the arrow next to 'BBC'. You will now see the information for that map.

10. Record in Table 1 the: Soil Profile Class (SPC), ie. The 'Dominant entity meaning'; SPC Generic Group; and Concept.

11. Do the same for the other location.

12. Go to the report associated with that map (Murtha et al. 1996, on LearnJCU), find the two Soil Profile Classes (or 'Series') you have identified, and fill in the fields in Table 2, recording ranges (ie. from minimum to maximum value) where appropriate.

Table 1. Soil Profile Class information (paste or copy table to separate answer document). (Question 1)

Coordinates	Site 1 (Same one done in class) Lat: -17.050°, Long: 145.780°	Site 2 Lat: -17.100°, Long: 145.802°
Soil Profile Class (SPC)
Concept

Table 2. Soil properties in a representative profile of each Soil Profile Class or 'Series' (paste or copy table to separate answer document). (Question 2)

	Site 1		Site 2
Depth (m)	~0-0.3 m	~0.3-1.0 m	~0-0.1 m	~0.9 m
Clay content (%)
pH

Rainfall and runoff data

You have set up an automatic rain gauge, flumes, depth sensor, data logger and automatic samplers to measure runoff from plots measuring 100 m x 5.5 m. Data from one rainfall event and one plot is shown in Table 3.

Question 3 - Calculate the load of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) that left the plot during the runoff event using a) the samples collected every 30 minutes and b) the single grab sample, and assuming that DIN concentration of water between samplings was the average of the preceding and succeeding sample, that concentration before the first sample had the same concentration as the first sample, and that concentration after the last sample had the same concentration as the last sample.

Question 4 - Why did the two values differ?

Question 5 - The runoff plots are on the Site 1 soil type (Table 1). If the same rainfall event had occurred on sugarcane of the same growth stage, managed in exactly the same way but on the Site 2 soil type, how would you expect the results to have differed and why?

Question 6 - Which soil type would you expect to have higher gaseous loss of nitrogen via denitrification and why?

Apparent electrical conductivity map of monitored field

Question 7 - Study the apparent electrical conductivity (ECa) map of the monitored paddock (Figure 2). Ignore the stripeyness, which is an artefact of the survey and mapping resolution. Looking at the map, knowing that this is in the wet tropics, with negligible salinity, and looking at Table 6 in Kuang et al. (2012), what do you think is the nature of the soil in the blue ribbon in the south of the paddock at depths of 0.4 and 0.9 m, compared to the rest of the paddock and how do you think it would influence the movement of shallow groundwater and its DIN load? Word limit 100 words.

Question 8 - What management and climatic factors would influence the losses of DIN via runoff and leaching? Base your answer on what you learned in the videos and from Webster et al. (2012) and Armour et al. (2013). If you are enrolled in EA5018 you should read more widely. Word limit 500 words.

Soil and water contamination

Question 9 - Perfluorinated alkylated substances (PFAS) are now widely found as contaminants in the environment. Significant PFAS has been found in groundwater at Cairns Airport, associated with the use of fire-fighting foam. The main PFAS found is perfluorooctane sulfonic acid or PFOS (Table 4). The soil at GW01_190612 is similar to the soil at Site 1 in Table 1. If the soil were the same as Site 2 in Table 1, do you think the PFOS concentration in the groundwater would be higher or lower? Why? Consult Oliver et al. (2019) and keep in mind that Kd is a measure of the strength of sorption. Given the same amount of PFOS applied on the ground, what other factors would influence the amount of PFOS moving to groundwater? If you are enrolled in EA5018 you should read more widely. Word limit 500 words.

Note - All required information are in attached file.

Attachment:- Field Studies in Land and Water Science Assignment File.rar