A long term data acquisition effort of profile soil moisture is under way in southwestern France at 13 automated weather stations. This ground network was developed in order to validate remote sensing and model soil moisture estimates. In this paper, both those in situ observations and a synthetic data set covering continental France are used to test a simple method to retrieve root zone soil m...

Many crop production management decisions can be informed using data from high-resolution aerial images that provide information about crop health as influenced by soil fertility and moisture. Surface soil moisture is a key component of soil water balance, which addresses water and energy exchanges at the surface/atmosphere interface; however, high-resolution remotely sensed data is rarely used...

Plant roots serve as conduits for water flow not only from soil to leaves but also from wetter to drier soil. This hydraulic redistribution through root systems occurs in soils worldwide and can enhance stomatal opening, transpiration, and plant carbon gain. For decades, upward hydraulic lift (HL) of deep water through roots into dry, litter-rich, surface soil also has been hypothesized to enha...

Many crop production management decisions can be informed using data from high-resolution aerial images that provide information about crop health as influenced by soil fertility and moisture. Surface soil moisture is a key component of soil water balance, which addresses water and energy exchanges at the surface/atmosphere interface; however, high-resolution remotely sensed data is rarely used...

Surface soil moisture data from different sources (satellite retrievals, ground measurements, and land model integrations of observed meteorological forcing data) have been shown to contain consistent and useful information in their seasonal cycle and anomaly signals even though they typically exhibit very different mean values and variability. At the global scale, in particular, it is currentl...

In soil magnetometry, two types of measurements are usually performed. The first type is measurements performed on the soil surface, frequently using an MS2D sensor. The second type includes measurements of magnetic susceptibility carried out in the soil profile, usually to a depth of about 30 cm. Up to now, such measurement results were analyzed separately. However, it is possible and advantag...

soil colloid particles influence soil chemical and physical properties by their surface electrical charge. with respect to the importance of this issue from both agricultural and environmental points of view, charging behavior of a kaolinite sample was studied in the ph range of 4 to 10 and at three background electrolyte concentrations, including 0.005, 0.05, 0.5 m nacl, by potentiometric titr...

A bioassay arena was developed to test the response of the Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica Newman (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae), to various plant-derived factors that may influence the selection of oviposition sites. In choice experiments with natural and artificial plant cues, females preferred to lay eggs in ryegrass rather than in artificial resources. Artificial grass stems received more eg...

Various applications such as meteorology, climatology or hydrology require information about the soil hydraulic properties over large areas. Microwave radiometry is a promising approach to gather this type of information. The microwave emission from soils is strongly affected by the roughness of the soil surface. This effect has therefore to be quantified to get a reasonable estimation of the h...

Radar based surface soil moisture retrieval has been subject of intense research during the last decades. However, the space-borne radar sensors available so far provided single configuration observations where the influence of surface roughness frequently caused the solution of the backscattering process to be ill-posed. The ENVISAT/ASAR sensor offers new perspectives since the alternating pol...