In our latest podcast, Dr. Neil Hansen, BYU professor of environmental science, discusses water conservation, the latest research on getting more crop per drop, exciting applications of remote sensing, and the challenges we face trying to meet changing water demands in a growing population.
The views and opinions expressed in the podcast and on this posting are those of the individual speakers or authors and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions held by METER.
Advances in sensor technology and software now make it easy to understand what’s happening in your soil, but don’t get stuck thinking that only measuring soil water content will tell you what you need to know.
Water content is only one side of a critical two-sided coin. To understand when to water, plant-water stress, or how to characterize drought, you also need to measure water potential.
Better data. Better answers.
Soil water potential is a crucial measurement for optimizing yield and stewarding the environment because it’s a direct indicator of the availability of water for biological processes. If you’re not measuring it, you’re likely getting the wrong answer to your soil moisture questions. Water potential can also help you predict if soil water will move, and where it’s going to go. Join METER soil physicist, Dr. Doug Cobos, as he teaches the basics of this critical measurement. Learn:
What is water potential?
Why water potential isn’t as confusing as it’s made out to be
Common misconceptions about soil water content and water potential
Dr. Cobos is a Research Scientist and the Director of Research and Development at METER. He also holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University where he co-teaches Environmental Biophysics. Doug’s Masters Degree from Texas A&M and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota focused on field-scale fluxes of CO2 and mercury, respectively. Doug was hired at METER to be the Lead Engineer in charge of designing the Thermal and Electrical Conductivity Probe (TECP) that flew to Mars aboard NASA’s 2008 Phoenix Scout Lander. His current research is centered on instrumentation development for soil and plant sciences.
What was the life of a scientist like before modern measurement techniques? In our latest podcast, Campbell Scientific’s Ed Swiatek and METER’s Dr. Gaylon Campbell discuss their association with three pioneers of environmental measurement.
Learn what it was like to practice science on the cutting edge. Discover the creative lengths they went to and what crazy things they cobbled together to get the measurements they needed.
Check out our latest podcast, where Dr. Richard Gill discusses his global research projects including climate change on the Wasatch Plateau, ranch sustainability in Colorado, reef studies in Samoa, and wildfires in the Mojave Desert.
Landscape in Samoa
He focuses on the connection between the ecology of a place and the communities of people that inhabit it, and how scientists can protect socially and ecologically vulnerable populations by collaborating equally with them. Unless they’re sharks. He found out they’re typically not open to collaboration.
Dr. Marco Bittelli, soil physics wizard and pretty much the most interesting guy we know, discusses his exciting research projects in Italy and Antarctica. Plus, he shares insights on cutting-edge measurement methods, climate change, jazz guitar music, and more.
Marco Bittelli, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Food Science at the University of Bologna in Italy.
Two researchers show easier methods conform to standards
If you’re measuring saturated hydraulic conductivity with a double ring infiltrometer, you’re lucky if you can get two tests done in a day. For most inspectors, researchers, and geotechs—that’s just not feasible. Historically, double ring methods were the standard, however the industry is now more accepting of faster single ring methods with the caveat that enough locations are tested. But how many locations are enough?
Triple the tests you run in a day
Drs. Andrea Welker and Kristin Sample-Lord, researchers at Villanova University, are changing the way infiltration measurements are captured while keeping the standards of measurement high. They ran many infiltration tests with three types of infiltrometers with a variety of sizes and soil types. In this 30-minute webinar, they’ll discuss what they found to be the acceptable statistical mean for a single rain garden. Plus, they’ll reveal the pros and cons of each infiltrometer type and which ones were the most practical to use. Learn:
What types of sites were tested
How the spot measurements compared with infiltration rates over the whole rain garden
Pros and cons of each infiltrometer and how they compared for practicality and ease of use
What is an acceptable number of measurements for an accurate assessment
Dr. Andrea Welker, PE, F.ASCE, ENV SP, is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Villanova University. She joined Villanova after obtaining her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the geotechnical aspects of stormwater control measures (SCMs) and the effectiveness of SCMs at the site and watershed scale.
Dr. Kristin Sample-Lord, P.E., is an Assistant Professor of geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Villanova University. She received her PhD and MS from Colorado State University. Her research includes measurement of flow and transport in soils, with specific focus on green infrastructure and hydraulic containment barriers.
The environment plays a large role in any plant study. Ensuring you’re capturing weather and other environmental parameters in the best way allows you to draw better conclusions. To accurately assess plant stress tolerance, you must first characterize all environmental stressors. And you can’t do that if you’re only looking at above-ground weather data.
For example, drought studies are notoriously difficult to replicate and quantify. Knowing what kind of soil moisture data to capture can help you quantify drought, allowing you to accurately compare data from different years and sites.
Get better, more accurate conclusions
It’s important for your environmental data to accurately represent the environment of your site. That means not only capturing the right parameters but choosing the right tools to capture them. In this 30-minute webinar, application expert Holly Lane discusses how to improve your current data and what data you may not be collecting that will optimize and improve the quality of your plant study. Find out:
How to know if you’re asking the right questions
Are you using the right atmospheric measurements? And are you measuring weather in the right location?
Which type of soil moisture data is right for the goals of your research or variety trial
How to improve your drought study, why precipitation data is not enough, and why you don’t need to be a soil scientist to leverage soil data
How to use soil water potential
How accurate your equipment should be for good estimates
Key concepts to keep in mind when designing a plant study in the field
What ancillary data you should be collecting to achieve your goals
Holly Lane has a BS in agricultural biotechnology from Washington State University and an MS in plant breeding from Texas A&M, where she focused on phenomics work in maize. She has a broad range of experience with both fundamental and applied research in agriculture and worked in both the public and private sectors on sustainability and science advocacy projects. Through the tri-societies, she advocated for agricultural research funding in DC. Currently, Holly is an application expert and inside sales consultant with METER Environment.
Measuring evapotranspiration (ET) to understand water loss from a native or a managed ecosystem is easier than it looks, but you have to know what you’re doing.
Learn causes and implications of uncertainty
If you can’t spend the time or money on a full eddy-covariance system, you’ll have to be satisfied with making some assumptions using equations such as Penman-Monteith.
Like any model, the accuracy of the output depends on the quality of the inputs, but do you know what measurements are critical for success? Plus, as your instrumentation gets more inaccurate, the errors get larger. If you’re not careful, you can end up with no idea what’s happening to the water in your system.
Get the right number every time
You don’t have to be a meteorologist or need incredibly expensive equipment to measure ET effectively. In this 30-minute webinar, Campbell Scientific application scientist Dr. Dirk Baker and METER research scientist Dr. Colin Campbell team up to explain:
The fundamentals of energy balance modeling to get ET
Assumptions that can simplify sensor requirements
What you must measure to get adequate ET estimates
Assumptions and common pitfalls
How accurate your equipment should be for good estimates
Dr. Dirk V. Baker has been with Campbell Scientific since 2011 and is an Application Research Scientist in the Environmental Group. Areas of interest include ecology, agriculture, and meteorology—among others. He has a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology and a doctorate in weed science, both from Colorado State University. Dirk’s graduate and postdoctoral research centered around measuring and modeling wind-driven plant dispersal.
Dr. Colin Campbell has been a research scientist at METER for 20 years following his Ph.D. at Texas A&M University in Soil Physics. He is currently serving as Vice President of METER Environment. He is also adjunct faculty with the Dept. of Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University where he co-teaches Environmental Biophysics, a class he took over from his father, Gaylon, nearly 20 years ago. Dr. Campbell’s early research focused on field-scale measurements of CO2 and water vapor flux but has shifted toward moisture and heat flow instrumentation for the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum.
Mismanagement of salt applied during irrigation ultimately reduces production—drastically in many cases. Irrigating incorrectly also increases water cost and the energy used to apply it.
Understanding the salt balance in the soil and knowing the leaching fraction, or the amount of extra irrigation water that must be applied to maintain acceptable root zone salinity is critical to every irrigation manager’s success. Yet monitoring soil salinity is often poorly understood.
Measure EC for consistently high crop yields
In this webinar, world-renowned soil physicist Dr. Gaylon Campbell teaches the fundamentals of measuring soil electrical conductivity (EC) and how to use a tool that few people think about—but is absolutely essential for maintaining crop yield and profit. Learn:
The sources of salt in irrigated agriculture
How and why salt affects plants
How salt in soil is measured
How common measurements are related to the amount of salt in soil
How salt affects various plant species
How to perform the calculations needed to know how much water to apply for a given water quality
Dr. Gaylon S. Campbell has been a research scientist and engineer at METER for over 20 years, following nearly 30 years on faculty at Washington State University. Dr. Campbell’s first experience with environmental measurement came in the lab of Sterling Taylor at Utah State University making water potential measurements to understand plant water status.
Dr. Campbell is one of the world’s foremost authorities on physical measurements in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. His book written with Dr. John Norman on Environmental Biophysics provides a critical foundation for anyone interested in understanding the physics of the natural world. Dr. Campbell has written three books, over 100 refereed journal articles and book chapters, and has several patents.
Everybody measures soil water content because it’s easy. But if you’re only measuring water content, you may be blind to what your plants are really experiencing.
Soil moisture is more complex than estimating how much water is used by vegetation and how much needs to be replaced. If you’re thinking about it that way, you’re only seeing half the picture. You’re assuming you know what the right level of water should be—and that’s extremely difficult using only a water content sensor.
Get it right every time
Water content is only one side of a critical two-sided coin. To understand when to water or plant water stress, you need to measure both water content and water potential.
In this 30-minute webinar, METER soil physicist, Dr. Colin Campbell, discusses how and why scientists combine both types of sensors for more accurate insights. Discover:
Why the “right water level” is different for every soil type
Why soil surveys aren’t sufficient to type your soil for full and refill points
Why you can’t know what a water content “percentage” means to growing plants
How assumptions made when only measuring water content can reduce crop yield and quality
Water potential fundamentals
How water potential sensors measure “plant comfort” like a thermometer
Why water potential is the only accurate way to measure drought stress
Why visual cues happen too late to prevent plant-water problems
Case studies that show why both water content and water potential are necessary to understand the condition of soil water in your experiment or crop
Dr. Colin Campbell has been a research scientist at METER for 20 years following his Ph.D. at Texas A&M University in Soil Physics. He is currently serving as Vice President of METER Environment. He is also adjunct faculty with the Dept. of Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University where he co-teaches Environmental Biophysics, a class he took over from his father, Gaylon, nearly 20 years ago. Dr. Campbell’s early research focused on field-scale measurements of CO2 and water vapor flux but has shifted toward moisture and heat flow instrumentation for the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum.
