Abstract:Soil particle-size distribution (PSD) is one of the most important physical attributes due to its strong influence on soil properties related to water movement, productivity and skil erosion. The fractal and multifractal measures were useful tools in identifying soil PSD with different taxonomy. Land-use type, as one of important factors to affect soil PSD, was paid little attention in the previous research. In this paper, Tyler and Wheatcraft power law and multifractal Rényi dimension were applied to characterize PSD in soils with the same taxonomy and different land-use types. Then the effects of land use on the fractal and multifractal parameters were analyzed. The study was conducted on the loess hilly areas of the Loess Plateau in China, of which the environment is characterized by hilly terrain with an altitude between 997 and 1731m, and semi-arid climate with a mean annual rainfall of 505mm and temperature of 8.6℃. A Calcic Cambisols soil was sampled from five land use types: woodland, shrub land, grassland, terrace farmland and abandoned slope farmland with planted trees (ASFP). The soil PSDs were obtained by laser diffraction technique using a Longbench Mastersizer2000. The result showed that: (1) fractal and multifractal parameters reflect different aspect of soil PSDs. There existed three power-law domains, namely Dsand, Dsilt, Dclay in all PSDs and can be ranked as Dsand > Dsilt > Dclay. The boundaries of three domains were close to the soil textural classification boundaries. (2) fractal dimension (D), dimension of silt domain (Dsilt),dimension of sand domain (Dsand), entropy dimension (D1) and entropy dimension/capacity dimension ratio (D1/D0) were significantly positively correlated with finer particle content. thus they could be potential parameters to reflect soil physical propertias influenced by land use. (3) D, Dsilt, Dsand, D0, D1 and D1/D0 were correlated with soil organic matter and were influenced by land use, providing potential indicator of soil quality influenced by land use. More significant result is required in the future study to test the applicability of fractal and multifractal parameters in characterizing land use effect on soil PSDs.