Landscape Soil Plant Available Water Study
Overview of project:
Measuring water in soil
It is easy to measure total water in a soil using moisture sensors or pulling samples to dry in an oven. For a given soil, plants will begin to be stressed at different moisture levels and through trial and error, a user can ball park what moisture level is adequate for deciding when to irrigate. For natural soils this can be straight forward, but we deal with manufactured and engineered soils that will have a wide variability. Matric potential is a direct measurement of how hard a plants root system has to work to extract water from the soil. Looking at this along with volumetric moisture can allow us to better design manufactured soils to optimize water availability and prevent issues in the landscape.
In addition to investigating plant available water in manufactured soils, we are also looking at applicability of matric potential sensors for control automated irrigation systems.
Facts on the project
It is easy to measure total water in a soil using moisture sensors or pulling samples to dry in an oven. For a given soil, plants will begin to be stressed at different moisture levels and through trial and error, a user can ball park what moisture level is adequate for deciding when to irrigate. For natural soils this can be straight forward, but we deal with manufactured and engineered soils that will have a wide variability. Matric potential is a direct measurement of how hard a plants root system has to work to extract water from the soil. Looking at this along with volumetric moisture can allow us to better design manufactured soils to optimize water availability and prevent issues in the landscape.
In addition to investigating plant available water in manufactured soils, we are also looking at applicability of matric potential sensors for control automated irrigation systems.
Facts on the project
- Project location:
- Gardens At Ball, West Chicago
- Site locations
- Perennial Bed prone to flooding and in the shade
- Vegetable Bed at higher elevation, full sun
- Soil media:
- PM35 from Midwest Trading
- An engineered soil consisting of pine bark, soil, sand and compost
- Equipment
- Sensors from Meter Group
- 1-ZL6 data logger sending measurement to cloud through cellular network
- 1-T8 Matric Potential Tensiometer at 6" depth
- 2-T21 Matric Potential Sensor at 4" or 8" depth
- 2 T12 Soil Mositure, temp, EC at 4" and 8" dept
If you are interested in learning more, you can contact us to discuss the project and I would encourage you to visit Meter Group (formerly decagon devices) or their youtube pages which have some in depth explanation into the science behind this project.
