Impacts of farming practices on soil hydrodynamics are central to understanding agricultural landscapes covering almost half of the world’s habitable land. Combining observations from distributed acoustic sensing with physics-based hydromechanical modeling, we tracked minute-resolution, meter-scale seismic and hydrological changes across agricultural fields with controlled histories of tillage and compaction. We show that dynamic capillary effects in soil govern transient stiffness and moisture redistribution in disturbed soils, producing sharp post-rain velocity drops from near-surface saturation and large hysteretic velocity rebounds driven by evapotranspiration. Our seismically inverted estimates of saturation reveal how disturbance alters flux partitioning and storage, establishing agroseismology and distributed acoustic sensing as scalable, noninvasive probes of soil hydromechanics with the potential to improve Earth system models, land management, and hazard resilience.
Shi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.