Dr Warren Bond.

Dr Warren Bond, Principal Research Scientist.

Dr Warren Bond: improving the measurement and delivery of soil water information

Dr Warren Bond's primary research areas include soil physics, soil water hydrology and soil physical chemistry.

  • 1 September 2010 | Updated 14 October 2011

Current activities

Dr Warren Bond is currently leading a small team that is developing an improved method for measuring soil water content, including buried wireless data acquisition and web-based delivery of information about soil water status in dryland agriculture.

Background

Dr Bond has been with CSIRO for 34 years and has carried out research in the following areas:

  • transport of water, solutes, suspended particles and micro-organisms in soils, particularly the interactions of solutes, suspended particles and micro-organisms with soil materials in the unsaturated zone
  • field application of soil water hydrology, particularly to land application of wastes, impact of land management on groundwater, and design of low recharge agricultural systems
  • development of inexpensive, wireless, soil water measurement systems suitable for on-farm use.
    Dr Bond has won several awards including the BHP Landcare Research Award for NSW, for the Wagga Wagga Effluent Plantation Project in 1995.

Academic qualifications

Dr Bond has been awarded a:

  • Bachelor of Science (Honours)  from the Flinders University, South Australia, 1974
  • Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Sydney, New South Wales, 1979

Achievements

Dr Bond is the author or co-author of more than 120 papers, reports and articles.

His research achievements include:

  • demonstrating the role of air entrapment in reducing the infiltration rate into freely vented soils
  • describing and predicting the role of anion exclusion in transport of anions through soils, accentuated in unsaturated soils; cation transport in unsaturated soils for binary and ternary exchange systems, simultaneous with anion exclusion; and the effect of continuously varying velocity during constant head infiltration on the hydrodynamic dispersion coefficient
  • renewing interest in the empirical Rothmund-Kornfeld description of cation exchange by deriving its relationship to physically-based exchange descriptions, and demonstrating its usefulness for predicting cation transport
  • simplifying the prediction of ternary cation exchange for the purpose of predicting cation transport, based on the Rothmund-Kornfeld model
  • demonstrating the effect of flow regime (transient versus steady) on the nature of 'immobile' water during solute transport
  • applying soil physical principles to estimate transient recharge and nitrate leaching under effluent-irrigated woodlots
  • applying soil physical principles to estimate transient recharge under low-rainfall dryland agriculture
  • demonstrating the significant effect of soil temperature on soil water measurement at depths up to 2 m by techniques that rely on measuring the bulk soil permittivity
  • leading a small team to develop an improved capacitance probe for soil water measurement and buried wireless data acquisition systems.

Dr Bond has won several awards including:

  • BHP Landcare Research Award for NSW, for the Wagga Wagga Effluent Plantation Project, 1995
  • CSIRO Chairman's Medal, for the Wagga Wagga Effluent Plantation Project, 1999

Professional activities

Dr Bond is a member of the:

  • American Geophysical Union
  • Australian Society Of Soil Science
  • Australian Water Association
  • International Society of Soil Science
  • Soil Science Society of America.

Find out more about CSIRO Land and Water.