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Soil microbial activity is greatly affected by soil water content. Determining the appropriate moisture content to rewet soils that have been dried in preparation for laboratory incubations to determine microbial activity can be laborious and time-consuming. The most common methods used achieve sufficient moisture content for peak microbial respiration are gravimetric water content, soil matric potential, or percentage of water-filled pore space (WFPS). Alternatively, a fast, simple, and accurate way to ensure that a given soil receives the appropriate amount of water for peak soil microbial respiration is to rely on natural capillary action for rewetting the dry soil. The capillary method is related to the gravimetric method for water uptake and has a strong correlation with WFPS. A microbial respiration test was conducted to compare rewetting methods. The 24-h carbon dioxide (CO2) / carbon (C) results were very similar and strongly correlated using the gravimetric method and the capillary method for rewetting dried soil.
Haney et al. (Sun,) studied this question.