Skip to main content
ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #411781
Research Project: From Field to Watershed: Enhancing Water Quality and Management in Agroecosystems through Remote Sensing, Ground Measurements, and Integrative Modeling

Location: Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory

Title: Soil moisture profiles of ecosystem water use revealed with ECOSTRESS

Author
item FELDMAN, A - Goddard Space Flight Center
item KOSTER, R - Goddard Space Flight Center
item CAWSE-NICHOLSON, K - California Institute Of Technology
item Crow, Wade
item HOLMES, T - Goddard Space Flight Center
item POUTLER, B - Goddard Space Flight Center

Submitted to: Geophysical Research Letters
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/23/2024
Publication Date: 4/22/2024
Citation: Feldman, A., Koster, R., Cawse-Nicholson, K., Crow, W.T., Holmes, T., Poutler, B. 2024. Soil moisture profiles of ecosystem water use revealed with ECOSTRESS. Geophysical Research Letters. 51. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL108326.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL108326

Interpretive Summary: Agricultural drought occurs when vegetation lacks the ability to uptake sufficient soil water through roots to support basic physiological functions. Despite significant advances in our understanding of agricultural drought, we still lack clear insight regarding the preferred depth of root water uptake and how this depth varies across vegetation type. Using ground-based soil moisture observations and newly available high-resolution estimates of land surface temperature acquired from remote sensing, this study calculates the preferred depth of root-water uptake for a range of ecosystems across the continental United States. Surprisingly, results suggest that most ecosystems tend to prefer root-water uptake at relatively shallow soil depths (generally less than 20 cm). This finding has important implications for our ability to model, and therefore predict, plant water stress associated with agricultural drought. Insight generated by this paper will also be used to define sensing depth requirements for the next generation of soil moisture sensors and instrumentation.

Technical Abstract: While remote sensing has provided extensive insights into the global terrestrial water, carbon, and energy cycles, space-based retrievals remain limited in observing the belowground influence of the full soil moisture profile on ecosystem function. We show that this gap can be addressed when coupling 70m resolution ECOSTRESS retrievals of land surface temperature (LST) with in-situ soil moisture profile measurements. These datasets together reveal that ecosystem water use progressively decreases with depth with 93% of sites showing LST coupling with soil moisture shallower than 20cm while 34% have interactions with soil moisture deeper than 50cm. Furthermore, the median depth of peak ecosystem water use is estimated to be 10cm, though forests have more common peak interactions with deeper soil layers (50-100cm) in 37% of cases. High spatial resolution remote sensing coupled with field-level data can thus elucidate the role of belowground processes on land surface behavior.