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In agriculturally dominated landscapes, a major part of the land and soil is intensively managed by human activities. The applied soil management strategies greatly influence the capacity of the soil to regulate many parameters, including the water balance, sediment transport, plant growth capacity, biodiversity, and climate change resilience on a field and landscape scale. The physical constitution or quality of soil forms the basis for its ability to sustainably provide these manifold functions to ecosystems which benefit our civilization (McKenzie et al., 2011). A comprehensive assessment of the actual soil physical quality (SPQ) allows for interpretations based on the present risks for soil functionality and the evaluation of different soil management strategies. Several SPQ-indicators (SPQIs) are available which account for certain soil characteristics or soil degradation risks. A frequently formulated aim in SPQ research has been to use indicators which represent a potentially high value of still reliable information which is possibly expressed by strong correlations to a high number of other SPQ characteristics (Koureh et al., 2020). As most scalar SPQIs are linked to certain soil characteristics, a combination of SPQIs allows for a detailed detection of soil degradation risks as well as an overall assessment of SPQ (Iovino et al., 2016). Furthermore, the appropriate SPQIs account for the dynamic nature of the soil, especially with regard to © 2020 Institute of Agrophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences T. WENINGER et al. 464 temporal changes in the physical constitution of the soil e.g. following soil management changes. Castellini et al. (2019), for example, evaluated five SPQIs using applied multivariate analysis techniques. The authors demonstrated strong correlations between several SPQIs and emphasized relative field capacity (RFC) as a key soil physical variable, especially for assessments of the effect of tillage. Koureh et al. (2020) linked SPQ measurements with the growth characteristics of wheat and emphasized the suitability of the SPQI Sinf, which represents the slope of the water retention function at the air inflection point and is a widely used SPQI, (Dexter and Czyż, 2007) and also its relationship to wheat growth. The effect of conservation tillage or reduced tillage on SPQ was analysed frequently under different climate and soil conditions. In the humid regions of Scandinavia and north-western France which have frequent rain deficits in summer, higher water reserves in dry periods and a greater macroporosity have been found under conservation tillage than under conventional tillage (e.g. Rasmussen, 1999; Bottinelli et al., 2013). However, in the humid climate of northern and western Europe, the application of conservation or no-tillage may promote undesirable anaerobic conditions in poorly drained soils, while it tends to be beneficial for water conservation and for macroporosity in the arid and semi-arid conditions of southern Europe (Moreno et al., 1996; Fernández-Ugalde et al., 2009). By contrast, on a clay soil in arid southern Italy, the hydraulic conductivity and the porosity were lower under conservation tillage than under conventional tillage due to a loss of pore volume (Castellini and Ventrella, 2012; Piccoli et al., 2020). Sandén et al. (2018) integrated the outcomes from 251 European long-term experiments, and found a higher abundance of earthworms, higher bulk densities and higher SOC concentration than for conventional tillage under non-inversion tillage (mainly) for the 0-30 cm soil layer. In Central Europe, and in particular under the conditions of the Pannonian climate, the impact of reduced tillage on SPQ has received very little attention, even though the region contributes considerably to the agricultural productivity of Central Europe. In this area, the choice of effective tillage methods for soil water conservation has become increasingly important as future climate scenarios predict an increase in drought and heat stress periods in the sensitive stages of plant development (Thaler et al., 2012; Olesen et al., 2011). Most comparably, Schlüter et al. (2018) found progressing compaction conditions with reduced tillage due to the lack of deep rooting crops and dry periods which caused earthworm inactivity in a semi-arid region in Germany with silt-dominated soil. The aim of this study was the detailed assessment of the SPQ with special emphasis on the Pannonian climate conditions of the Marchfeld region in Austria, an important agricultural area in Central Europe. We measured and calculated multiple SPQIs which were hypothesized to allow for the precise detection of critical SPQ conditions and soil physical degradation hazards in different soil profiles. The investigated field trial was managed under three different tillage systems continuously over a period of 24 years, which also allowed for the determination of the medium-term effects of changes in soil management on SPQ. MATERIALS AND METHODS The Fuchsenbigl experimental site is located in the Pannonian lowlands, a transition region between the semi-humid western European climate zone and the continental eastern European climate zone (Thaler et al., 2012). The region is characterized by hot, dry summers and cold winters with little snowfall. The mean annual temperature between 1988 and 2012 was 10.1°C, and the mean annual precipitation was 583 mm. The soil type is a Haplic Chernozem according to the FAO classification. As the terrain is flat, lateral water erosion did not occur and no relevant wind erosion was observed at the sites. Crop rotation was cereal-based, typically consisting of winter wheat, sugar beet, spring barley and maize. Three different tillage treatments were applied continuously since 1988 (Spiegel et al., 2007): – Conventional tillage (CT): Stubble processing by wing share cultivator after harvest (brand: Regent, 23 cm wing width, overlapping construction), tillage before seeding by mouldboard plough (brand: Vogel and Noot, 25-30 cm working depth), seedbed preparation by seedbed combination (brand: Pettner, equipped with rollers and tine harrow with working depth 5-8 cm). – Reduced tillage (RT): Primary tillage and stubble processing by wing share cultivator (15 cm working depth), seedbed preparation with seedbed combination. – Minimum tillage (MT): Sowing either by rotary driller (brand: Horsch) with no further treatment or preparation by rotary tiller before sowing (5-8 cm working depth). All crop residues remained on the field. The area had already been used as arable land and conventional tillage was the standard soil management procedure before the experiment commenced. In the experiment, the different treatments were applied on plot strips arranged in a 3 × 3 randomized block design. Each plot covered an area of 60 × 12 m, including a buffer of 1 m along each border. Soil samples were taken in March 2001 and August 2012 for each treatment and at four depths: 2-7, 10-15, 15-20 and 32-37 cm. In 2001, a transect of three soil profiles was analysed in the central block of the field. Closely adjacent to these profile points, three corresponding profiles were examined in 2012 to account for temporal changes (the spatial notation for both is transect South, tsS). Additionally, a transect of three profiles with a longitudinal distance of 50 m to the former was sampled to account for spatial variability (transect North, tsN). Undisturbed soil samples (n = 5, steel sampling cores with a volume of 200 cm3) were PHYSICAL QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF SOIL PROFILES 465 used to determine the bulk density, the soil water retention characteristics (WRC) and saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks). Bulk soil samples (n = 1, mixed sample) were taken from the immediate surroundings of the cores by using a shovel. These disturbed samples were used for the analysis of soil texture, soil organic carbon (SOC) and particle

Detection of physical hazards in soil profiles using quantitative soil physical quality assessment in the Pannonian basin, Eastern Austria