An experiential account with recommendations for the design, installation, operation and maintenance of a farm-scale soil moisture sensing and mapping system.

Brendan Malone; David Biggins; Chris Sharman; Ross Searle; Mark Glover; Stuart Brown

Just Accepted

This article has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication. It is in production and has not been edited, so may differ from the final published form.

An experiential account with recommendations for the design, installation, operation and maintenance of a farm-scale soil moisture sensing and mapping system.

Brendan Malone , David Biggins, Chris Sharman, Ross Searle, Mark Glover, Stuart Brown

Abstract

Context The research explores benefits of real-time tracking of soil moisture for various land management contexts and the importance of spatiotemporal modelling and mapping in gaining clear and visual understanding of soil moisture fluxes across a farm. Aims This research aims to defragment the key processes required for building an operational on-farm soil moisture monitoring system where the product is highly granular daily soil moisture maps depicting variations temporally, spatially and vertically. Methods We describe processes of capacitance soil moisture probe installation, data collection infrastructure, sensor calibration, spatiotemporal modelling, and mapping. Key Results From an out-of-bag soil moisture evaluation over the nearly 2 years the modelling system has been tested in this research, a model accuracy (RMSE) estimate of 0.002 cm-3 cm-3 and concordance of 0.96 were found. This result is averaged over this period but fluctuated daily, and related to rainfall patterns across the target farm, which were not directly incorporated into the modelling framework. As expected, incorporating prior estimates of soil moisture into the modelling framework proved to contribute to very accurate estimates of real-time available soil moisture. Conclusions This research promotes the importance of iterative improvements to the soil moisture monitoring system, particularly in areas of sensor recalibration and spatiotemporal modelling. We stress the need for a longer-term view and plan for ongoing maintenance and improvement of such systems in the emerging digital farming ecosystem. Implications The results of this research will be useful for researchers and practitioners involved in the design and implementation of on-farm soil monitoring systems.

SR24004 Accepted 04 July 2024