Latest Scientific Paper! Soils are a crucial component of forest hydrology - for water storage and release. This Forest Flows research, led by Shanxi Agricultural University's Dr Hongfen Zhu, developed a novel way to optimise where to place sensors within a forested catchment to capture soil water movement and storage at different depths. These are called time stable locations. Thus, we need a lot less sensors to monitor soil water throughout a forest catchment.
Unlike previous studies, we demonstrated that forested catchment soil water dynamics can be explained with spatial position, topography and soil properties. Importantly, we found similarities in soil water dynamics across our 5 primary research catchments - despite differences in total rainfall, geology and soils. Thus, these results can be applied for other forested catchments.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002216942400739X
The results of this paper will provide a foundation of future Forest Flows results and papers coming out in 2024.
Co-authors are Scion's Dean Meason, Serajis Salekin, Priscilla Lad, and Jianming Xue; Lincoln University (NZ)'s Wei Hu; and Shanxi Agricultural University Yaodong Jing.
The Forest Flows Endeavour Programme is by the NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment