Information
Level 2 Detail of experimental conditions (what might be found in a journal paper or project brief in Hydstra)
Description of study
What?
A land use comparative studied analysed the off-site transport of TSS, TN, TP and TOC across three sites in South Australia.
When and Where?
The experiment was conducted at three field sites within Mt Lofty Ranges, South Australia from May 2006 to December 2009. The sites were as follows:
- An 8 ha sub-catchment of Cock Creek with cherries covering 50% (4.0 ha). The remainder of the sub-catchment consisted of native vegetation, grower’s house, road and dam. Total stone fruit production in the Cock Creek catchment is 68 ha, which is 2.4% of the total catchment.
- A 64 ha sub-catchment of Cock Creek with apples covering 54% (34.6 ha). The remainder of the area was native vegetation and dams. Total pome fruit production in the Cock Creek catchment is 703 ha, which is 24.8% of the total catchment.
- A 155 ha sub-catchment of Charleston catchment with vines (wine grapes) covering 27% (41.9 ha). The remainder of the area consisted of grazing land, dams, grower’s house and road. Total grape production in the Charleston catchment is 355 ha, which is 6.5% of the total catchment.
The study area has a Mediterranean climate with total average annual rainfall of 1015mm. The MLR catchment has cool wet winters (June to August) and dry, hot summers (December to February). The main soil type across all sites was a Red Yellow Chromosol. The maximum slope across the sites was 30o with a mean of 13o.
How?
Each site was equipped with an automatic rain gauge, ISCO model 4230 bubble flow meter (Nebraska USA), ISCO model 3700 auto-sampler (Nebraska USA), 80 watt solar panels and 4 × 65 Ah deep cycle batteries. All sites were also equipped with an Odyssey logging capacitance probe (Dataflow Systems Pty. Ltd., Christchurch NZ) as a backup system to measure water flow.
Total suspended solids (TSS) were measured by filtering a measured volume of water through Whatman glass fibre filters (1.2µm) that had been conditioned by wetting with high quality water, dried at 40◦ C then weighed. The filter and sediment was then oven dried at 40◦ C and re-weighed and the mass of sediment in the known volume of water was determined and expressed as mg/L.
Water samples were analysed for total nutrient concentrations in unfiltered samples. Total N (TN) and C (TOC) were determined using a Skalar Formacs High Temperature TOC/TN Analyser. Total P (TP) was measured using inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy (ICP).
Project administration
Site identifier code: NA
Principal investigator: Cox JW
Principal data manager: NA
Principal organizations: The University of Adelaide, South Australian Research and Development Institute, CSIRO Land and Water
Data custodian: NA
Key co-operators: NA
Data access policy: Research has been published but base data is not archived
Planned pathway for data: completed study, no evidence of formal database records.
Data warehousing: for ongoing studies -na
Planned data upload frequency: for ongoing studies -na
Key references and sources of this data synthesis
These data summaries have been extracted from:
i. Cox JW, Oliver DP, Fleming NK, Anderson JS. 2012. Off-site transport of nutrients and sediment from three main land-uses in the Mt Lofty Ranges, South Australia. Agricultural Water Management 106: 50-59.
Keywords:
Nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, total organic carbon, agriculture