Agroseismology and the impact of farming practices on soil hydrodynamics
Summary
The 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 and 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
Content
# Agroseismology and the impact of farming practices on soil hydrodynamics
*Published: 2026 Apr 16*
The 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 and
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.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aec0970