Multifractal Characterization of Soil Pore Systems

nez,* Roberto Quiroz, and Richard Protz Adolfo N. D. Posadas, Daniel Gime ABSTRACT
Spatial arrangement of soil pores determines soil structure and is important to model soil processes. Geometric properties of individual pores can be estimated from thin sections, but there is no satisfactory method to quantify the complexity of their spatial arrangement. The objective of this work was to apply a multifractal technique to quantify properties of ten contrasting soil pore systems. Binary images (500 by 750 pixels, 74.2 m pixel1) were obtained from thin sections and analyzed to obtain f() spectra. Pore area and pore perimeter were measured from each image and used to estimate a shape factor for pores with area larger than 0.27 106 m2. Mean area of the lower (MAL) and upper (MAU) one-half of cumulative pore area distributions were calculated. Pore structures with large (MAU 10 106 m2) and elongated pores exhibited flat f()-spectra typical of homogenous systems (three soils). Massive type structure with small (MAU 1 106 m2) rounded and irregular pores resulted in asymmetric f()-spectra (two soils). Well defined and symmetric f()spectra were obtained with soil structures having elongated pores of intermediate size (1 106 MAU 10 106 m2) clustered around relatively small structural units (five soils). Multifractal parameters defining the maximum of the f()-spectra were correlated to total porosity (P 0.001), and silt content (P 0.05). This study demonstrates that the spatial arrangement of contrasting soil structures can be quantified and separated by the properties of their f()-spectra. Multifractal parameters quantifying spatial arrangement of soil pores could be used to improve classifications of soil structure.

arly attempts to classify the arrangement of pores and solids from thin sections led to the development of semi-quantitative classification systems based mainly in the relationship between fine (i.e., inorganic and organic soil colloid) and coarse material (Jim, 1988). Application of these systems to the characterization of soil thin sections have shown that arrangement of soil material is correlated to particle-size distribution, organic matter content, and pedogenic processes (Eswaran and Banos, 1976; Brewer, 1979; Goenadi and Tan, 1989). The development of the general field of mathematical morphology allowed quantifying the shape, size, and connectivity of soil pores (RingroseVoase, 1987; Horgan, 1998; Holden, 2001). Size, shape, and spatial arrangement of pores have been used to classify soil structure (Ringrose-Voase and Bullock, 1984; Pagliai and De Nobili, 1993). Pore shape and size have been related to water flow, pedogenetic processes,

A.N.D. Posadas, International Potato Center (CIP), P.O. Box 1558, and Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, FCF-DAFI, Lima 12 Peru ; D. Gime nez, Dep. of Environmental P.O. Box 10584, Lima 1- Peru Sciences, Rutgers Univ., 14 College Farm Road, New Brunswick, NJ 08901; R. Quiroz, International Potato Center (CIP), P.O. Box 1558, ,; R. Protz (deceased), Dep. of Land Resource Science, Lima 12 Peru Univ. of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada. Received 27 Aug. 2003. *Corresponding author (gimenez@envsci.rutgers.edu). Published in Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J. 67:13611369 (2003). Soil Science Society of America 677 S. Segoe Rd., Madison, WI 53711 USA

and biological activity (Bouma et al., 1977; RingroseVoase, 1987; Pagliai and De Nobili, 1993). The selection and interpretation of the morphological parameters of soil pores that best characterize soil structure, however, is still a subject of research (Droogers et al., 1998; Holden, 2001). Statistical methods of characterization of pore-solid arrangement from images emphasize the spatial structure of pores with the advantage of being more amenable to modeling soil structure and processes (Dexter 1976, 1977; Moran and McBratney, 1997; Garboczi et al., 1999; Horgan, 1999; Vogel and Roth, 2001). Among the statistical methods used to characterize soil structure, fractal techniques are relatively common in soil science (Anderson et al., 1996; Pachepsky et al., nez et al., 1997). Fractal geometry assumes 1996; Gime that the dependence of the properties of a system with scale (scaling) can be represented with a power law, with the exponent being typically a function of a fractal dimension. However, it has become increasingly evident that knowledge on the fractal dimension of a set is insufficient to characterize its geometry (Loehle and Li, 1996). The fractal dimension, D, characterizes the average properties of a set and cannot provide information on deviations from the average behavior of a power law. For example, the box-counting technique is used to estimate D from images of pore systems by covering them with a grid of boxes of various sizes. The technique ignores the variations in pore density within a box other than categorizing boxes as empty or occupied (Vicsek, 1992). As a result, sets with different appearance or textures may have similar fractal dimensions (Mandelbrot, 1982; Voss, 1988). On the other hand, a multifractal analysis captures the inner variations in a system by resolving local densities and expresses them in the shape of a multifractal spectrum (Hentschel and Procaccia, 1983; Frisch and Parisi, 1985; Halsey et al., 1986; Chhabra et al., 1989; Chhabra and Jensen, 1989). The multifractal concept has been useful in studies of spatial arrangement of physical and chemical quantities (Stanley and Meakin, 1988; Feder, 1988; Evertsz and Mandelbrot, 1992; Cheng and Agterberg, 1996), turbulence (Meneveau and Sreenivasan, 1991), and geology (Muller and McCauley, 1992; Cheng, 1999). In soil science, multifractal techniques have been applied to the characterization of particle- and pore-size distributions (Grout et al., 1998; Caniego et al., 2001; Posadas et n and Montero, 2002), surface strength al., 2001; Mart (Folorunso et al., 1994), and spatial variability of soil properties (Kravchenko et al., 1999). The only published report on the application of a multifractal method to soil pores is an analysis of the histogram of pore area
Abbreviations: MAL, mean area of the lower one-half of cumulative pore-area distributions; MAU, mean area of the upper one-half of cumulative pore-area distributions.

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Table 1. Soil classification and selected properties of the studied soil horizons.
Horizon Group 1 Soil 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Soil classification Spodosol Argiaquic Argialboll Typic Haplorthox Typic Haplorthox Inceptisol Orthoxic Tropudult Mollic Albaqualf Petric Plinthudult Entisol Entisol Type C B B B C B B A BC B Depth cm 6573 3440 3038 7078 2025 3340 4752 18 2032 614 Organic matter 0.1 0.4 1.2 0.7 0.3 0.3 0.4 1.7 1.3 1.1 Sand % 54.0 3.1 20.0 22.0 94.6 48.0 2.7 12.0 2.7 1.4 15.0 66.2 22.0 6.0 4.9 21.0 67.1 51.0 63.5 65.2 31.0 25.1 58.0 72.0 0.4 31.0 30.2 37.0 33.8 33.4 Silt Clay

2 3

According to the soil taxonomy.

that did not consider the spatial arrangement of pores (Caniego et al., 2001). A multifractal analysis done on binary images has shown that spatial patterns of pores in rocks are multifractal (Muller and McCauley, 1992). This conclusion cannot be extrapolated to soil pore systems because of the differences in genesis between rocks and soils. Thus, the objective of this paper was to apply a multifractal method to binary images of soil pores representing contrasting soil structures. This approach has the advantage of integrating the spatial properties of pore systems. THEORY
Fractal dimensions offer a systematic approach to quantifying irregular patterns that contain an internal structure repeated over a range of scales (Meakin, 1991). For a fractal object the number of features of a certain size , N(), varies as:

Pi(L) Li

[4]

where i is the Lipschitz-Holder exponent characterizing scaling in the ith region or spatial location (Halsey et al., 1986). In our case, these exponents reflect the local behavior of the measure Pi (L ) around the center of a box with diameter L, and can be estimated from Eq. [4] as i log Pi (L )/ log(L )(Fig. 1d and 1e). Note that similar i values are found at different positions in an image. The number of boxes N() where the probability Pi has exponent values between and d is found to scale as (Chhabra et al., 1989; Halsey et al., 1986):

N() Lf()

[5]

N() D

[1]

where f() can be defined as the fractal dimension of the set of boxes with exponent . Equation [5] generalizes Eq. [1] by including several indices to quantify the scaling of a system. Multifractal measures can also be characterized through the scaling of the qth moments of Pi distributions in the form (Chhabra et al., 1989; Korvin, 1992):
N(L) i1

where D is the fractal dimension. Equation [1] is a scaling (or power) law that has been shown to describe the size distribution of many objects in nature. The box-counting technique is used to obtain the scaling properties of two-dimensional fractal objects by covering a measure with boxes of size L and counting the number of boxes containing at least one pixel representing the object under study, N(L ):

P iq(L) L(q1)Dq

[6]

where Dq are the generalized fractal dimensions defined from Eq. [6] as:

logN(L) D0 lim L0 log(1/L)

Dq lim
L0

[2]

1 q1

log P iq(L)
i1

N(L)

logL

[7]

Using Eq. [2], the box-counting dimension D0 can be determined as the negative slope of log N(L ) versus log(L ) measured over a range of box sizes. The disadvantage of the boxcounting technique is that the process does not consider the amount of mass inside a box Ni (L ) and is, therefore, not able to resolve regions with high or low density of mass. Multifractal methods are suited for characterizing complex spatial arrangement of mass because they can resolve local densities (Vicsek, 1992). In practice, a way to quantify local densities is by estimating the mass probability in the ith box as:

The exponent in Eq. [6] is known as the mass exponent of the qth order moment, (q ) (Halsey et al., 1986; Vicsek, 1992):

(q ) (q 1) Dq

[8]

Pi(L) Ni(L)/NT

[3]

where Ni(L ) is the number of pixels containing mass in the ith box and NT is the total mass of the system. Examples of spatial patterns of Pi (L 10) and Pi (L 50) for Soil 7 (Fig. 4, Table 1) are shown in Fig. 1b and 1c, respectively (L is expressed in pixels). Also important is to quantify the scaling (or dependence) of Pi with box size L. For heterogeneous or non-uniform systems the probability in the ith box Pi(L ) varies as:

From Eq. [7] we see than when q 0 all the boxes have a weight of unity, the numerator becomes N(L ), and Dq becomes the capacity dimension, D0 (Eq. [2]). Similarly, when all the boxes have the same probability, that is, Pi 1/N, Dq D0 for all values of q and (q ) becomes a linear function of q (homogeneous fractal). Two other special cases are for q 1 and q 2. The values D1 and D2 are known as the entropy dimension and the correlation dimension, respectively. The entropy dimension is related to the information entropy of Shannon and Weaver (1949), which quantifies the decrease in information as the size of the boxes increases. The correlation dimension D2 is mathematically associated with the correlation function and computes the correlation of measures contained in a box of size L. The connection between the power exponents f() (Eq. [5]) and (q ) (Eq. [8]) is made via the Legendre transformation (Callen, 1985; Halsey et al., 1986; Chhabra and Jensen, 1989):

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Fig. 1. Illustration of multifractal theory applied to a binary image. (a) binary image of Soil 7 (500 750 pixels), spatial pattern of probabilities Pi(L ) calculated with Eq. [3] using (b) L 10 and (c) L 50 pixels, and spatial pattern of the exponent i estimated with Eq. [4] using (d) L 10 and (e) L 50 pixels.

f [(q )] q(q ) (q )
and

[9a]

(q)

d(q) dq

[9b]

The function f() is concave downward with a maximum at q 0. In natural systems, and f() are not evaluated at the limit L 0, but rather in the scaling region in which and f() can be described as powers of L, which also restricts the range of q values that can be used.

dure outlined in VandenBygaart and Protz (1999). Images had a size of 500 750 pixels, with a pixel size of 74.2 m. Distributions of pore area, A, and perimeter, P, were calculated from each image using NIH-Image software (Rasband, 1993). Pore area was used to calculate cumulative distributions. Mean pore areas of the lower one-half of a distribution, MAL, and upper one-half of a distribution, MAU, were calculated. Pore shapes were estimated by calculating a shape index, F, for pores with pore area larger than 0.27 106 m2 or 50 pixels2:

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Ten thin sections of soils with contrasting soil structure and soil texture were selected for this study (Table 1). Binary images of soil thin sections were produced following the proce-

4A P2

[10]

Three basic pore shapes were defined based on the values F: planar when F 0.2, irregular when 0.2 F 0.5, and rounded when F 0.5 (Bouma et al., 1977). For each image,

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Fig. 3. Example of f(q ) and (q ) functions estimated in the range of q values in which the numerators of Eq. [12] and [13] were linear with log L (see Fig. 2).

N(L)

(q) lim
L0

i1

i(q,L) log[Pi(L)] logL [13]

Fig. 2. Examples of application of (a) Eq. [12], and (b) Eq. [13] to the binary image of Soil 7 for selected q values. Values of f(q ) and (q ) were obtained from the slope of plots similar to those in (a) and in (b), respectively. The plot of (q 1.0) illustrates data that resulted in R2 0.88, one of the lowest found in this study (R2 for the rest of the plots can be found in Table 3).

the percentage of total porosity falling in each one of the pore shape categories was determined. The method developed by Chhabra and Jensen (1989) was implemented in MatLab 6.0 (The Math Works Inc., Natick, MA) and used to calculate the f()-spectra. Images were partitioned in boxes of size L, for L 2, 3, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 125, and 250 pixels. A family of normalized measures i(q,L ) was constructed for positive and negative values of q covering variable ranges in steps of 0.1:

For each q, values of f(q ) and (q ) were obtained from the slope of plots of the numerators of Eq. [12] and [13] vs. log L over the entire range of L values considered (2250 pixels). The range of q values over which both functions were linear, q, was selected considering the coefficients of determination (R2) of both fits (Fig. 2). The f(q ) and (q ) functions obtained over a given q (Fig. 3), were used to construct the f()-spectra as an implicit function of q and L. In addition, we tested the validity of the results by verifying that the tangent of the graph f() vs. at (q 1) is the bisector defined by df()/d q. The point of intersection corresponds to f[(1)] [1] D1 (Evertsz and Mandelbrot, 1992). The symmetry of multifractal spectra was evaluated by comparing the width of the spectra from their center [(0)] to (|qi|). Values of |qi| were the same in both the positive and negative domains and equal to the smaller of the two defining a q interval.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Thin sections for this study were primarily selected to include contrasting soil structures (Fig. 4). Soil texture among selected soils showed wide ranges in the percentages of sand (1.494.6%), silt (4.967.1%), and clay (0.4 72%). Organic matter content was relatively low (0.1 1.7%) because mainly subsurface horizons were sampled (Table 1). In this study, distributions of cumulative pore area ranged from relatively balanced distributions to bimodal ones with few pores concentrating relatively large percentage of the porosity (Fig. 5). Formation of soil structure implies development of a bimodal poresize distribution with the largest pores (macropores) being found between structural units. The largest variability in the distribution of pore area across soils occurred in the macropore size, as indicated by the wide range of variation in the values of the MAU (Table 2). Typically, macropores resulting from the formation of

i(q,L)

P iq(L)
N(L) i1

[11]

P iq(L)

where Pi(L ) is the fraction (or probability) of pores contained in each ith box of size L (Eq. [3]). Note that for any value of q, the normalized measures take values in the interval [0,1]. The direct computation of f(q ) values is (Chhabra et al., 1989; Chhabra and Jensen, 1989):
N(L)

f(q) lim
L0

i1

i(q,L)log[i(q,L)] logL [12]

In addition, values of (q ) were computed by evaluating:

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Fig. 5. Selected cumulative distributions of pore area measured on binary images.

Fig. 4. Binary images of the studied soil thin sections separated in groups of similar pore properties.

structural units are elongated in shape and interconnected (Bouma et al., 1977; Ringrose-Voase and Bullock, 1984). Except for Soil 9 and Soil 10, between 50 and 74% of the total porosity contributed by pores with area larger than 0.27 106 m2 was formed by elongated pores suggesting that pedogenetic processes were active in these soils (Table 2). Three groups of soils were distinguished using the values of porosity and MAU. Soils in Group 1 (Soil 1

to Soil 5) have relatively higher porosities and smaller MAU values than soils in Group 2 (Soil 6 to Soil 8), but in both groups elongated pores concentrate the largest proportion of soil porosity (Table 2). On the other hand, soils in Group 3 (Soil 9 and Soil 10) have the lowest porosity and smallest values of MAU. Pore shapes in this group were predominately irregular and rounded (Table 2). Rounded pores are typically the result of random packing of particles or aggregates, whereas irregular voids may originate from the compaction of rounded pores or from biological activity (RingroseVoase, 1987; Pagliai and De Nobili, 1993). A visual assessment of soil structure shows that structural units in Group 1 were smaller than in Group 2, but in both cases more developed than the two samples in Group 3 that exhibited massive structure characterized by a coherent mass and the absence of structural units (Fig. 4).

Multifractal Analysis
A crucial step in multifractal analysis is to determine the range of both L and (negative and positive) moments of order q over which a multifractal method is

Table 2. Total porosity, mean pore area of the lower (MAL) and upper (MAU) one-half cumulative distribution of this property, and pore shape classes (expressed as percentage of total porosity) measured from binary images.
Pore-shape classes Total porosity 0.17 0.15 0.20 0.16 0.21 0.09 0.13 0.13 0.06 0.06 MAL 106m2 0.051 0.046 0.068 0.037 0.066 0.053 0.054 0.083 0.025 0.034 MAU 106m2 5.049 3.832 3.204 0.899 1.770 8.608 77.646 12.699 0.345 0.692 F 0.2 0.2 F 0.5 % Total porosity 50.2 55.2 49.8 34.9 51.7 61.6 73.5 67.4 11.7 13.2 18.6 11.4 23.8 16.9 17.1 13.3 3.35 9.5 18.3 28.1 1.7 2.3 1.9 2.4 1.2 3.0 2.8 4.2 2.4 8.8 F 0.5

Group 1

Soil 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

2 3

Only pores with area 0.27 106 m2 are included.

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Table 3. Selected multifractal parameters the residual error of the estimates from the analysis of binary images. Also shown are the values of the coefficients of determination of the fits (R2).
q Group 1 Soil 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 q 1.4 2.5 1.4 2.0 1.3 1.0 1.3 1.0 1.0 2.0 q 2.3 2.8 3.5 3.0 5.0 1.3 1.0 1.4 2.4 4.0 1.75 1.73 1.79 1.78 1.82 1.58 1.64 1.65 1.53 1.56 D0 0.03 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.05 0.04 0.04 0.05 0.04 R2 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.98 0.98 0.99 0.98 0.98 1.70 1.67 1.73 1.72 1.77 1.56 1.63 1.63 1.49 1.50 D1 0.09 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.08 0.07 0.09 0.03 0.04 R2 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 f [(1)] 1.70 1.66 1.73 1.71 1.74 1.57 1.62 1.64 1.51 1.52 0.18 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.12 0.16 0.17 0.12 R2 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 (0) 1.81 1.80 1.85 1.84 1.88 1.61 1.67 1.68 1.59 1.63 0.04 0.05 0.04 0.04 0.04 0.06 0.06 0.05 0.06 0.06 R2 0.98 0.98 0.98 0.98 0.99 0.95 0.96 0.97 0.97 0.96 max 1.94 2.01 2.00 2.03 2.06 1.65 1.74 1.72 1.65 1.77 1.30 1.40 1.30 1.00 1.00 1.30 1.20 1.30 1.10 1.40 R2 0.88 0.87 0.90 0.92 0.93 0.85 0.87 0.85 0.85 0.87 min 1.67 1.60 1.67 1.65 1.66 1.56 1.63 1.63 1.44 1.36 0.05 0.09 0.08 0.06 0.10 0.05 0.07 0.02 0.05 0.16 R2 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99 0.99

2 3

D0, D1, and f [(1)] are fractal dimensions at q 0, q 1, and q 1, respectively; (0), max, and min are the values of the Lipschitz-holder exponent at q 0, and at the most negative (q) and most positive (q) values that defined the range q over which the multifractal method was applied.

applicable (Saucier and Muller, 1999). In our case, this meant determining the range of L and q in which the numerators of Eq. [12] and [13] are linear functions of log L. A constant L range (2250 pixels) was used in this study to avoid representing multifractal properties over a small interval of scales. The range of q values was selected considering the coefficients of determination (R2) of the fits (see Fig. 2), which in general were equal or larger than 0.95 (Table 3). In a few cases, lower values of R2 were accepted when the relatively poorer fit involved only one of the two functions (Fig. 2). The largest variation in q was observed in the range of positive q values (Table 3). Moments q 0 magnify the contribution of boxes with high concentration of pores to the estimates of either f(q ) or (q ). The opposite is true for q 0. Soils in Group 1 and Group 3 exhibited multifractal properties over a wider range of moments q than soils in Group 2 (Table 3). Since soils in Group 2 have larger pores than soils in Group 1 and Group 3, it is possible that a complete characterization of pore scaling in soils of Group 2 would require sampling an area larger than the provided by a thin section. Analyses of local porosity and of the mean entropy of a soil structure have shown that, in general, the size of thin sections is enough for an appropriate representation of the lower moments of porosity distributions (Dexter, 1977; VandenBygaart and Protz, 1999), but there are no studies on the relationship between sampled area and the higher moments of a measure of porosity. The f()-spectra among groups showed distinctively different shape and symmetry (Fig. 6). The curvature and the symmetry of the f()-spectra provide information on the heterogeneity of a system defined by the diversity of scaling exponents needed to characterize it. The f()-spectra of homogeneous systems with fractal support is reduced to a single point corresponding to the maximum value of f() found at q 0, that is, f[(0)] D0. Heterogeneity can be assessed at q 0 by the magnitude of the differences in the values of D0 and (0), or more generally, by the magnitude of changes around D0 in both the f() and axes. Values to the right and left of D0 represent negative and positive q values, respectively (see Fig. 3). In the f() axis, comparison is between D0 and the values of f[(1)] or (D1)

and f[(1)]. In the axis, the difference (max min) is used as an indication of the heterogeneity of a system. In our analysis, porosity and D0 values were highly correlated (Table 4). These results are similar to the ones reported by Lipiec et al. (1998), who correlated box-counting dimensions of pore volume with porosity for a soil compacted at various levels (R 0.97). Correlation between D0 and porosity provides no information on the scaling properties of a pore structure because calculation of D0 assumes a homogeneous soil structure (at every partition level, all boxes have the same probability). On the other hand, (q ) can distinguish among soil structures by quantifying the average scaling of mass density (or probability) with L. Porosity and (0) were also highly correlated (Table 4), but a comparison between D0 and (0) values reveal differences in pore structure among soils. Soils in Group 2 exhibited the most homogeneous pore system as demonstrated by the proximity of their values to the 1:1 line (Fig. 7a). This tendency to homogeneity (or simple scaling) in soils of Group 2 is further confirmed by the notably smaller values of the differences D0 D1, D0 f [(1)], and (max min) for soils in this group (Table 3). The implication of this finding is that pore systems in Group 2 soils can be characterized almost entirely by the capacity dimension D0. This interpretation needs to be weighted by considering that soils in this group scaled over a narrow range of q values (Table 3), which might indicate that in the presence of macropores sampling area should be larger than the one used here. This hypothesis is supported by the negative correlation between log of MAU and the largest value of positive q over which the multifractal method applies (Table 4). In a symmetric spectrum, the widths from (0) to (|qi|) are equal (or very similar) implying that regions with high and low concentrations of mass scale similarly. Soils in Group 1 and Group 2 had f()-spectra that were more symmetrical than spectra from soils in Group 3 as indicated by the proximity of the -intervals to the 1:1 line (Fig. 7b). The left-hand side of the f()-spectra of soils in Group 3 exhibited the lowest f() values in this region of the spectrum. Fractal dimensions with values similar to the observed f() values have been obtained in analyses of dye-stained patterns, which are typically disconnected in the plane perpendicular to flow

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(Table 3 and Fig. 6). On the other hand, several studies have demonstrated relationships between textural composition and soil microstructure (Eswaran and Banos, 1976; Brewer, 1979). If general relationships between multifractal parameters of soil structure and soil properties are established, it could serve as a first approximation to the characterization and modeling of soil pore systems. In our study silt content was significantly correlated to D0, (0), and D1 (Table 4). These parameters represent the behavior at or around the maximum point of the f()-spectra, and the correlations could be the result of silt (and to a lesser extent sand) content being correlated to total porosity. Even though more research is needed to understand the mechanisms underlying these correlations, they illustrate the potential for developing characterization schemes of soil structure that includes soil texture as a general framework (Eswaran and Banos, 1976; Brewer, 1979). More accurate characterization of relationships between texture and soil structure may need to involve the parameterization of the particle-size distribution (Posadas et al., 2001).

CONCLUSIONS
The multifractal f()-spectra successfully separated contrasting soil structural types. Three soil groups, distinguished based on size and shape of pores, resulted in f()-spectra that were distinctively different. Properties of the f()-spectra important to distinguish among groups were: (i) the range of negative and positive q values over which scaling was verified, and (ii) the shape and symmetry of the spectra. Soil pore structure containing clusters of relatively large pores exhibited scaling over a reduced range of moment q and relatively flat f()-spectra, which might have resulted from a limited sampling area in relation to the size of the largest pores. Asymmetrical f()-spectra were obtained in samples of massive structure characterized by low porosity dominated by small rounded and irregular pores and a matrix without noticeable structural units. The lowest values of and f() obtained in this group suggest a pore system with disconnected pores and low spatial density. Symmetric f()-spectra exhibiting the typical concave downward shape were obtained with soil structures that combined small structural units and relatively small pores. The advantage of multifractal techniques is that a f()-spectrum integrates and quantifies spatial properties of a pore system. Conceivably, multifractal parameters could be used to improve classifications of soil structure. Thus, an approximation to the shape and properties of a spectrum could be useful as an approximation to pore structure. The relationship between silt content and multifractal parameters found in this study indicate the potential for such approach, but a systematic and more extensive analysis of images of soil sections representing various levels of the soil taxonomy is needed to identify and interpret parameters from the f()-spectrum and their relation to soil properties and processes.

Fig. 6. f()-spectra for soils in (a) Group 1, (b) Group 2, and (c) Group 3, as shown in Fig. 4.

(Lipiec et al., 1998). The absence of structural units (massive structure) and pore clustering is also evident in the lowest values obtained for these two soils. It is generally recognized that particle- and pore-size distributions are not well correlated in structured soils. For instance, Soil 7 and Soil 9 have very similar contents of sand, silt, and clay (Table 1), but different f()-spectra

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Table 4. Correlation coefficients between selected multifractal parameters and pore properties measured in thin sections (total porosity, log MAL, and log MAU) or on different soil samples (organic matter, sand, silt, and clay contents).
Multifractal parameters D0 D1 (0) max min q q Total porosity 0.940*** 0.987*** 0.940*** 0.844** 0.505 0.118 0.368 log MAL 0.493 0.613 0.387 0.189 0.062 0.446 0.237 log MAU 0.039 0.196 0.079 0.225 0.016 0.350 0.715* Organic matter 0.335 0.364 0.321 0.323 0.666 0.139 0.022 Sand 0.520 0.547 0.492 0.403 0.351 0.281 0.407 Silt 0.669* 0.669* 0.641* 0.544 0.438 0.147 0.342 Clay 0.090 0.050 0.086 0.084 0.045 0.181 0.181

* Significant at the 0.05 probability level. ** Significant at the 0.01 probability level. *** Significant at the 0.001 probability level. Significant at the 0.1 probability level. D0 and D1 are fractal dimensions at q 0 and q 1, respectively; (0), max, and min are the values of the Lipschitz-holder exponent at q 0, and at the most negative (q) and most positive (q) values that defined the range q over which the multifractal method was applied.

Fig. 7. Plots of (a) (0) vs. D0 and (b) widths of -intervals: (0) (qi,) vs. (qi,) (0) for soils in the three groups considered. The numerical values of qi, and qi, were the same and equal to the smallest of the two values defining a q interval (see Table 3). Proximity to the 1:1 line implies (a) more homogeneous distributions, or (b) more symmetric f()-spectra. In plot (b) two soils of Group 2 had identical values and show as one point in the graph.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Prof. Richard Protz passed away suddenly on 17 Nov. 2001 without being able to participate in the preparation of this paper. We gratefully acknowledge his active and valuable contributions throughout the duration of this project. The authors a Tarquis for useful discussions are grateful to Dr. Ana Mar on multifractal theory, and to the reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.

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