Irrigation practices greatly affect sustainable agriculture development. In this study, we investigated the effects of irrigation efficiency on water flow and chemical transport in soils, which had significant impact on the environment. Field dye staining experiments were conducted at different soils with various irrigation amount. Image analysis was conducted to study the heterogeneous flow patterns and their relationships with the irrigation efficiency. Irrigation efficiency and its environmental effects were evaluated using various indictors, including application efficiency, deep percolation ratio, storage efficiency, and uniformity. Under the same irrigation condition, soil chemical distributions were more heterogeneous than soil water distributions. The distributions were mainly affected by soil texture, initial soil water content, and irrigation amount. Storage efficiency, irrigation uniformity, and deep percolation ratio increased with irrigation amount. Since the chemical distribution uniformity was lower than the water uniformity, the amount of chemical leaching increased sharply with decrease of irrigation uniformity, which resulted in high environmental risks of groundwater pollution.
