Summary
This European interlaboratory comparison evaluated the reproducibility of soil water retention curve (SWRC) measurements across 14 laboratories using artificially constructed reference samples. The study found that interlaboratory variability was the dominant source of measurement variation, substantially exceeding intralaboratory variability on average, and attributed this to the absence of harmonised and standardised measurement procedures. The authors conclude that standardisation of SWRC measurement protocols is essential to improve the reliability of soil databases and derived pedotransfer functions and maps.
UK applicability
The findings are directly relevant to UK soil science and laboratory practice, as any UK laboratories participating in or contributing to national soil databases or pedotransfer function development would be affected by the lack of standardisation. The results suggest that UK soil property databases may contain quality issues if they pool measurements from multiple laboratories using different methods.
Key measures
Inter- and intralaboratory variability in soil water retention measurements; sample-to-sample variability; effects of sample changes between measurements; linear mixed-effects models with Bayesian inference
Outcomes reported
The study quantified inter- and intralaboratory variability in measurements of the wet part of the soil water retention curve (10–300 hPa) across 14 European laboratories using standardised reference samples. Results demonstrated that interlaboratory variability was the largest source of measurement differences, with substantial variation in intralaboratory reproducibility between laboratories.
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