Fractal metrology for biogeosystems analysis

Abstract

Abstract. The solid-pore distribution pattern plays an important role in soil functioning being related with the main physical, chemical and biological multiscale and multitemporal processes. In the present research, this pattern is extracted from the digital images of three soils (Chernozem, Solonetz and "Chocolate'' Clay) and compared in terms of roughness of the gray-intensity distribution (the measurand) quantified by several measurement techniques. Special attention was paid to the uncertainty of each of them and to the measurement function which best fits to the experimental results. Some of the applied techniques are known as classical in the fractal context (box-counting, rescaling-range and wavelets analyses, etc.) while the others have been recently developed by our Group. The combination of all these techniques, coming from Fractal Geometry, Metrology, Informatics, Probability Theory and Statistics is termed in this paper Fractal Metrology (FM). We show the usefulness of FM through a case study of soil physical and chemical degradation applying the selected toolbox to describe and compare the main structural attributes of three porous media with contrasting structure but similar clay mineralogy dominated by montmorillonites.