Information

Level 2 Detail of experimental conditions (what might be found in a journal paper or project brief in Hydstra)

Description of study

What?

The study monitored soil erosion and canopy cover over a three year crop cycle on a range of slopes and row gradients on a commercial pineapple farm.

When and Where?

The Moreton and Wide Bay / Burnett regions of south-east Queensland represent 80% of the State’s pineapple crop area, encompassing 4800 hectares of mostly sloping lands. From 1979-1982 (3 year investigation) a study was undertaken on a commercial farm in the Woombye (Nambour) district.

The site was a north-facing slope on Landsborough sandstone with red podzolic soils on the upper convex slope grading to an earthy sand on the lower concave slope. The six monitored crop rows were positioned across the convex section where the hillslope ranged from 7.3% to 20.8%. Pineapples are planted in double rows in raised beds 1.7 m apart. Crop rows gradients ranged from 3.0% to 5.8% and were 27.6 m long.

How?

Silt traps were positioned at the outlet of each row to collect sediment carried by runoff. Captured sediment was dried and weighed on 19 occasions between October 1979 and January 1982. Rainfall and rainfall intensity was measured on site via a pluviometer.

Canopy cover measurements were also taken in October 1979, March 1980 and June 1980 using the meter stick method (Hartwig and Leflen 1978), which began after the initial crop was planted in April 1979.

Project administration

Site identifier code: na

Principal investigator: M.A Capelin

Principal data manager: -na

Principal organizations: Queensland Department of Primary Industries

Data custodian: Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM)

Key co-operators: -na

Data access policy: Research has been published as a brief summary.

Planned pathway for data: completed study (no 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

  1. Capelin M.A, Truong P.N .1985. Soil erosion within pineapple fields in south-east Queensland
  2. Capelin M.A.1987. Horticulture land suitability study sunshine coat southeast Queensland Department of Primary Industries. ISSN 0811-9007

Key words

Horticulture, pineapples, south-east Queensland, sediment, slope

 

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