EAGER SitS: Quantifying the value of information for sensor placements to improve soil signals for agricultural water management

鉴于全球粮食安全依赖于强有力的农业用水管理，有必要更好地提供信息，并更好地了解不同类型环境中的土壤湿度信号。这些信号是农业用水管理的重要投入。对土壤湿度信号缺乏适当了解仍然是可持续农业管理的一个持续挑战，特别是在干旱条件下。发展这样的理解是本研究的主题。土壤水分的空间异质性和变异性极大地阻碍了使用点尺度原位监测捕捉这个变量的动态。虽然遥感产品可用于提供土壤水分信息，但它们仅限于提供粗分辨率的汇总信息，而且往往具有很大的不确定性，不适合需要更精细/局部尺度信息的农业用水管理。本项目将采用的土壤湿度监测（传感器）网络的稳健设计旨在确保向利益攸关方提供充分和适当的数据（例如农民和牧场主）这样他们就可以在自己的水管理需求方面做出最明智的决定。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

Given the reliance of global food security on robust agricultural water management, there is a need to better inform and improve understanding of soil moisture signals in different types of environments. Such signals are an important input for agricultural water management. The lack of proper understanding of soil moisture signals remains a persistent challenge in sustainable agricultural management, especially during drought conditions. Developing such an understanding is the subject of this research.The spatial heterogeneity and variability of soil moisture greatly hinders the use of point scale in situ monitoring for capturing the dynamics of this variable. Although remote sensing products are available to provide soil moisture information, they are limited in providing only aggregated information at coarse resolution and are often characterized by large uncertainty, which is unsuitable for agricultural water management that requires finer/local scale information. The robust design of soil moisture monitoring (sensor) networks to be pursued by this project is targeted to ensure the sufficient and adequate representation of data provided to stakeholders (e.g. farmers and ranchers) so that they can make the most informed decisions possible concerning their own water management needs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.