Winter Cover Cropping Management Enhances Soil Hydraulic Properties and Water Resiliency Under Climatic Variability

Atmosphere warming causes higher summer temperatures, droughts and more intense rain events. At the same time, land conversion towards more simplified crop sequences affects soil hydraulic properties, which determine water capture, transport and storage, threatening agricultural production. This study explores the soil hydraulic properties response to contrasting climatic scenarios and the consequent impact on soil water dynamics under two contrasting agricultural managements. The objective of this work was to evaluate the effects of alternative management with winter cover cropping during fallow (CF) on soil hydraulic properties (saturated hydraulic conductivity, K 0 ; pore size distribution; plant available water content, PAWC; soil sorptivity, S; and pore connectivity, Cw) and soil water content (0–20 cm and 20–40 cm depth) in a long‐term field experiment (2018–2024), including wet, normal and dry seasons, as compared to bare fallow management (BF). Results show that climate was one of the main factors affecting soil hydraulic properties, increasing water retention capacity during wet and normal periods, while dry periods caused increasing macroporosity. With the inclusion of cover crops, the soil plant available water content (PAWC) was up to 0.13 m 3 m −3 higher as compared to bare fallow, ameliorating the impact of drought periods. Under cover cropping management, increasing the soil capacity of capture and storage water, with a more interconnected pore system, improved the soil water status for the summer crop, especially in the 0–20 cm soil depth. The use of cover crops increased up to 60% the mean values of soil volumetric water content during the summer crop, even after dry winters. The results found in this work support the strategic use of winter cover crops as a resilience tool in agricultural systems facing climate risk.