Geophysical Techniques for Plant, Soil, and Root Research Related to Sustainability

The sustainable management of human activities, from production to waste dis-posal and the cycling of finite resources is one of the great challenges of research for the coming decades, stemming from societal needs and the growing awareness of environmental mechanisms. Research on geophysical methods provides an inter-disciplinary approach to such challenges by addressing the need for techniques to assist in designing and moni-toring strategies for sustainability in agriculture and other environment-related sciences. In the past few decades technological advances have produced new tools or have improved existing techniques for near-surface geophysical investigation in a ro-bust, cost-effective and non-invasive way. Experimental results have proved that soil physical properties thus detected and mapped can be used as a proxy of physical, chemical and biological features relevant for the appropriate management of soils, based on their behavior, spatial variability and time-dynamics.. This chapter reviews principles of the techniques and reports selected research re-sults on environmental and agronomic research

Ground-Based Soil Moisture Determination

Soil water content is a key variable for understanding and modeling ecohydrological processes. In this chapter, we review the state of the art of ground-based methods to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamic of soil water content, from point to field scale. First, point measurements methods are briefly discussed. Then, field-scale hydrogeophysical approaches such as ground-penetrating radar, ground-based L-band radiometry, electromagnetic induction, electrical resistivity tomography, cosmic-ray neutron probes, global navigation satellite system reflectometry, and nuclear magnetic resonance are described in more details. The basic principles of the different techniques, the spatial and temporal characteristics of their measurements, their advantages and limitations, as well as the recent developments in the data processing are presented