We selected a dark coniferous forest ecosystem of Gongga Mountain in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River as our research area to study the preferential flow and solute preferential transport by adding the tracers KNO3 and KBr to the self-made soil column equipment in different ways to examine density and volume changes of inflows and outflows of a mass input (impulse input) and a stable,well-distributed input (step input)).The results showed that this dark coniferous forest ecosystem of Gongga Mountain is a typical area of preferential flow and solute preferential transport,a process that can be classified into five parts.A great amount of solute was transported at high speed as the result of preferential flow in the soil and caused the density of the solute in both deep water and in groundwater to rise rapidly,which definitely increased pollution in the deep soil layer.
