This textbook is developed from lectures for a graduate class in soil-plant- water relations taught at Kansas State University. Students in the class are from a number of departments, including agronomy, biology, horticulture, forestry and recreational resources, biochemistry, and biological and agricultural engineering.
The book can be used as a text for a graduate- or upper-level undergraduate courses or as a self-study guide for interested scientists. The book follows water as it moves through the soil-plant-atmos¬phere continuum. The text deals with principles and is not a review of recent literature. The principles covered in the book, such as Ohm’s law and Poiseuille’s law, are ageless. The book has equations, but no knowledge of calculus is required. Because plant anatomy is often no longer taught at universities, chapters review root, stem, leaf, and stomatal anatomy. Instrumentation to measure status of water in the soil and plant also is cov¬ered. Many instruments could have been described, but the ones chosen focus on traditional methods such as tensiometry and psychrometry and newer methods that are being widely applied such as tension infiltrometry and time domain reflectometry. Because the humanistic side of science is usually overlooked in textbooks, each chapter ends with biographies that tell about the people who developed the concepts discussed in that chapter.
Although a textbook on water relations might logically include devel-opments in molecular biology, this topic is not covered. Rather, the text focuses on water in the soil and whole plant and combines knowledge of soil physics, plant physiology, and microclimatology. Chapter 1 reviews population and growth curves and provides a rationale for studying water in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Chapter 2, which defines physical units, at first may appear elementary, but many students have not had a class in physics. The definitions in this chapter lay the foundation for understanding future chapters. Chapter 3 goes over the unique structure and properties of water, which makes life possible. Chapter 4, on tensiome¬try, is the first instrumentation lecture. Other instrumentation lectures include Chapter 9 on penetrometer measurements; Chapter 10 on measure¬ment of the oxygen diffusion rate in the soil; part of Chapter 11 on applications of tension infiltrometry to determine soil hydraulic conductivity, sorptivity, repellency, and solute mobility; Chapter 13 on time domain reflectometry; Chapter 16 on psychrometry; Chapter 17 on pressure cham¬bers; Chapter 22, which includes ways to measure stomatal opening and resistance; and Chapter 24 on infrared thermometers. Chapters 4 through 13 focus on water in the soil; Chapters 14 through 22, on water in the plant; and Chapters 23 through 27, on water as it leaves the plant and moves into the atmosphere.
Within any one chapter, the notation is consistent and abbreviations are defined when first introduced. When the same letter stands for different parameters, such as A for “ampere” or “area” and g for “acceleration due to gravity” or “grams,” these differences are pointed out.
I express my appreciation to the following people who have helped make this book possible: my sister, Victoria E. Kirkham, professor of romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, who first suggested on March 12, 1999, that I write this book; Dr. Kimberly A. Williams, Associate Professor of Horticulture, who audited my class in 2000 and then nominated me for the College of Agriculture Graduate Faculty Teaching Award, of which I was the inaugural recipient in 2001; Mr. Martin Volkmann in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Rienk van der Ploeg of the University of Hannover in Germany, for converting the first drafts of the electronic files of the chapters, which I had typed in MS-DOS using WordPerfect 5.1 (my favorite word-processing software), to Microsoft Word documents, to ensure useable back-up copies in case my 1995 Compaq computer broke (it did not); my students, who have enthusiasti¬cally supported the development of this book; anonymous reviewers who had helpful suggestions for revisions and supported publication of the book; publishers and authors who allowed me to use material for the fig¬ures; and Mr. Eldon J. Hardy, my long-time professional draftsman at Oklahoma State University, now retired. His drafting ability is unparal¬leled. He has redrawn the figures from the original and ensured that they are uniform, clear, and precisely done.
I am grateful to the publishers, Elsevier, including Michael J. Sugarman, Director, for accepting my book for publication, and Kelly D. Sonnack, Editorial Coordinator, for her help during the production of this book. Through my late father, Don Kirkham, former professor of soils and physics at Iowa State University, I have known of the venerable scientific publications of Elsevier since I was a child and truly am “non solus” with a book.
(Source: M. B. Kirkham | Kansas State University | 2005)
principles, soil, plant, water, soil and plant water, principles of soil and plant water relations