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Advancements in wildfire danger modeling may increase wildfire preparedness, and therefore decrease loss of life, property, and habitat due to wildfire. Recent work by our team has shown wildfire danger models may be improved by incorporating soil moisture information. Still, soil moisture—an important determinant of wildfire risk—is not currently used for wildfire danger assessments because adequate soil moisture information has historically been unavailable. Our project addressed this gap by developing and disseminating improved soil moisture estimates and demonstrating their relevance to wildfire danger assessments. Our objectives were to (1) develop an effective model of soil moisture for the Red River and Rio...
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Researchers developed a custom model that integrates gSSURGO soil property data with condensed climate data from PRISM (e.g., drought index) to predict fraction of available water for a given soil. The model was trained with in situ measured soil moisture data (point measurements) and expanded to spatial extent with gSSURGO maps and PRISM data. The code for the model was developed using a combination of statistical and GIS languages (R, Matlab, ArcGIS, etc.).
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Soil moisture is a fundamental determinant of plant growth, but soil moisture measurements are rarely assimilated into grassland productivity models, in part because methods of incorporating such data into statistical and mechanistic yield models have not been adequately investigated. Therefore, our objectives were to (a) quantify statistical relationships between in situ soil moisture measurements and biomass yield on grasslands in Oklahoma and (b) develop a simple, mechanistic biomass-yield model for grasslands capable of assimilating in situ soil moisture data. Soil moisture measurements (as fraction of available water capacity, FAW) explained 60% of the variability in county-level wild hay yield reported by...
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Soil moisture depletion during the growing season can induce plant water stress, thereby driving declines in grassland fuel moisture and accelerating curing. These drying and curing dynamics and their dependencies on soil moisture are inadequately represented in fire danger models. To elucidate these relationships, grassland fuelbed characteristics and soil moisture were monitored in nine patches of tallgrass prairie under patch-burn management in Oklahoma, USA, during two growing seasons. This study period included a severe drought (in 2012), which resulted in a large wildfire outbreak near the study site. Fuel moisture of the mixed live and dead herbaceous fuels (MFM) clearly tracked soil moisture, expressed as...
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Abstract (from Science Direct): Agricultural drought is characterized by low soil moisture levels that negatively affect agricultural production, but in situ soil moisture measurements are largely absent from indices commonly used to describe agricultural drought. Instead, many indices incorporate weather-derived soil moisture estimates, which is necessary, in part, because the relationships between in situ soil moisture and agricultural-drought impacts are not well quantified. Our objective was to use in situ soil moisture data from monitoring networks in Oklahoma and West Texas to identify a soil moisture-based agricultural drought index that is (i) strongly related to crop-yield anomaly across networks, (ii)...
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