from probes to pixels: scaling-up soil water content monitoring across montana
Drought ranks among the primary threats to the sustainability and productivity of agriculture in Montana and across the Western US broadly, with climate change projections indicating increased frequency and intensity throughout this century. This suggests that agricultural production across Montana will be increasingly shaped by periods of water limitation. Of the many ways in which changes to water availability may manifest in agricultural systems, we expect alterations to root-zone soil water content to be the most consequential for dryland crop and forage production. Tools that can diagnose and forecast near-term changes to root-zone soil water content would aid producers and policy makers across Montana in making informed decisions within the short time that allows for adaptive management of agricultural resources.
This project seeks to “scale-up” real-time soil water content monitoring and forecasting across Montana. To this end, we propose to integrate Montana’s Mesonet with NASA’s SMAP satellite mission and environmental data predictive of soil water content dynamics. The Montana Mesonet is one of the largest state-level networks of soil water content monitoring in the United States, providing accurate, near-real-time root-zone soil water content measurements. However, tools to extrapolate these small-scale point measurements across large spatial extents are still missing. This project will build an initial data acquisition and assembly pipeline, and modeling framework to predict, map and forecast root-zone soil water content across Montana at intermediate spatial resolution. Gridded assessments and near-term forecasts of drought risk rooted in soil water content will not only benefit Montana stakeholders but also serve as a proof-of-concept to motivate proposal development for larger pools of funding to tackle soil water issues at the National level. This project will foster collaborations between early-career faculty within MSU and between MSU, the Montana Climate Office, and University of Montana’s Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group that is driving continental scale modeling efforts.
Dr. Andrew Felton is an assistant professor of plant and ecosystems ecology in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Science at Montana State University. His research is focused on understanding how water-limited ecosystems respond to climate-driven changes in water availability, with a focus on the western United States.
Dr. Anna Schweiger is an assistant professor of remote sensing in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Science at Montana State University. Her research is focused on developing scalable theory and methods for remote sensing of biodiversity and ecosystem function.