R software packages as a tool for evaluating soil physical and hydraulic properties

Abstract The determination of soil physical properties requires complex analyzes performed by software, which are mostly paid access programs. The advantage of using R software is that it is open access and offers several packages for the analysis of soil physic-hydrical properties data. The objective of this review is to present and to disseminate the tools available in R for studies in soil physics. We briefly describe some packages of the R software for soil physics and analyze their ease of reproduction. From the examples given in the manuals of each package we observed that their reproducibility was not always self-explanatory, as verified for the packages soilwater and SoilHyP. The HydroMe and soilphysics packages were the most comprehensible to be reproduced. The most common determination offered by these packages is related to soil water retention curve models. We hope this will guide the soil science researchers to employ, more often, R codes to analyze their data. The R scripts that were used to exemplify the packages reported in this paper are available at https://github.com/sousaetal/COMPAG_2019_600 .

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