In this edition of GEOGRAPHY REVIEW, Joseph Holden has written about soil pipes and the important role they play in delivering water, carbon and potentially pollutants to stream channels (page 8). Studying pipes is challenging as by definition they are underground. In the article Joe refers to surveys of pipes undertaken with ground-penetrating radar. You won’t have this to hand when you carry out your NEA but a study of soil pipes is still possible in places where erosion has revealed a cross section of the soil.
The peatland gullies that Joe writes about are one location where you could undertake a visual survey of soil pipes and another potential location is stream banks. By systematically surveying stream banks to visually identify macropores you could determine their frequency in different soil types or examine the variation in size and shape of soil pipes under different land uses.
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