Abstract The impact of rainfall and light interception by litter on maintenance of surface soil water content is determined in an arid rangeland in Khabr National Park in south-east of Iran. Litter weight sampling is done by 90 square plots, each 1 m2, that are randomly placed within site. After determining the intensity of a typical storm of the region (20 mm/h), the rainfall duration requir...

A quantitative understanding of soil water content or soil water status is of great importance to many applications, such as landslide monitoring, rockfill dam health monitoring, precision agriculture, etc. In this paper, a feasibility study was conducted to monitor the soil water content in real time using permanent embedded piezoceramic-based transducers called smart aggregates (SAs). An acti...

Studies show that the performance of soil water content monitoring (SWCM) sensors is affected by soil physical and chemical properties. However, the effect of organic matter on SWCM sensor responses remains less understood. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to (i) assess the effect of organic matter on the accuracy and precision of SWCM sensors using a commercially available soil wate...

concluded that coaxial probe design was superior to two-wire probes with a balancing transformer. Management of favorable conditions for plant growth within parTopp and Davis (1985) extended measurement capatially wet soil volumes under drip irrigation presents a measurement bilities from a small volume (point) to multiple depths challenge. Typically, soil water status is determined from a sing...

Drought and shortages of soil water are becoming extremely severe due to global climate change. A better understanding of the relationship between vegetation type and soil-moisture conditions is crucial for conserving soil water in forests and for maintaining a favorable hydrological balance in semiarid areas, such as the Saihanwula National Nature Reserve in Inner Mongolia, China. We investiga...

Interpretation and evaluation of combined measurement techniques for soil CO 2 efflux: Discrete surface chambers and continuous soil CO 2 concentration probes" [1] Soil CO 2 efflux is a large respiratory flux from terrestrial ecosystems and a critical component of the global carbon (C) cycle. Lack of process understanding of the spatiotemporal controls on soil CO 2 efflux limits our ability to ...