Dataset and Software to support "An energy-based model of soil fragmentation by tillage"
Abstract
This record contains the data and R code supporting the article “An energy-based model of soil fragmentation by tillage” by Heller et al. The model predicts tillage-induced soil fragmentation from the applied mechanical energy and the initial soil state, represented by soil water content and initial specific fragment surface area. It partitions tillage energy among three processes: the creation of new fragment surfaces, the displacement of existing fragments and plastic deformation. The model was parameterised and evaluated using literature-derived data from drop-shatter tests and tillage experiments. The included analyses demonstrate the model’s ability to reproduce the texture- and moisture-dependent soil workability range and the diminishing effectiveness of successive tillage operations. Under simplifying assumptions, the predicted fragment surface area can also be translated into fragment-size and inter-fragment pore-size distributions, providing a basis for representing tillage-induced structural changes in agroecosystem models. Repository contents soil_breaking.Rmd: Main analysis used to run the model and reproduce the results and figures presented in the article. Functions/: R functions used by the model and analyses. Input_data/: Input data used for model parameterisation, evaluation and application. Plastic_Limit.Rmd: Supplementary analysis of the soil plastic-limit data published by Keller and Dexter (2012). soil_consolidation.Rmd: Preliminary development of a model describing the collapse of tillage-induced pore space under stress. This component is exploratory and is not part of the published tillage-fragmentation model. The model is implemented in R and primarily uses the tidyverse package for data manipulation and visualisation. Additional package dependencies are declared in soil_breaking.Rmd. Related publication Heller, O., Carminati, A., König, S., Koestel, J., Vogel, H.-J., Weller, U. and Keller, T. An energy-based model of soil fragmentation by tillage. Soil & Tillage Research, 265, 107446.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.still.2026.107446 The current version of the code is also available from the GitLab repository.
