above 20 years, some area of clay soil was irrigated by mixed water from normal water and sewage water and the yield was more decreased than the stander. please which parameters, should I measure them in the soil, water and plants?
There are two different ways that you can follow
1st You can conduct all the all the analyses imposed by the legislation of your country
2nd you can focus at a specific subject and conduct all the needs analyses for concluding the results of the 20 year mixed irrigation. For example you can investigate the fate and transport of human drugs throughout the water soil plant atmosphere continuum.
As it concerns soil chemical properties you must have the soil analyses before implementing mixed water irrigation. The same applies for the soil physical properties. As for the accumulation of heavy metals or other chemical compounds provided their existence in the mixed water you have to conduct analyses of the part of the plant (eg roots, fruits flowers etc) that each chemical compound accumulates (in each growing stage of the selected plant)
I believe that you have to be more specific in order to help you.
Nevertheless I believe that you will be helped if you take a look at the following papers
Article Evaluation of Sparta’s municipal wastewater treatment plant’...
Article Evaluation of the use of treated municipal waste water on th...
Article The Effect of Treated Municipal Wastewater and Fresh Water o...
Dear Mr. George Bourazanis
Many thanks for your information and attached papers. i will read them.
Best regards
Many tree and plant species cannot grow well or even survive in frequently irrigated system, and probably even more so with clay soils. It can sometimes take over 30 years to develop hydric soil characteristics, but you could check on that. I am not in computer, so will try to send you Corps of Engineers wetland delineation manual if you cannot find on internet or you dont already have. It may be as simple as the area was overloaded with water. However if the area already had hydrophytic plants, and was a wetland, it is less likely but still possible to be too much water for plants, even if adapted to periodic saturated conditions in the growing season. Some plants can do OK in periodic saturation, but not permanent ot inundation. Under wetland conditions, available phosphorus may be low. Since clay soils are not well drained, I would first look into this. If you want to measure something, measure water table height and this can be done with transducer such as Hobo water level (internet). In the 1970s, Sopper and Kardos at Penn State University published several papers on sewage irrigation, and their studies may give you added ideas. I coauthored a researchgate paper in 1975, but we irrigated well drained bottmland in Missouri you might look at. On an adjacent colluvial bottomland area, John Turner and I planted 8 species in a replicated study, and I am unsure if that was ever published, but some species did well as green ash, cottonwood, bald cypress, and some did poorly, like white oak, black walnut, pine.
You could still have some of the other suggested issues if heavy metals were involved, and you might test for that in soil or plant materials, or irrigation water.
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