Invited talk at the 2008 Soil Science Society of America

Kelly was invited to give a talk at the 2008 SSSA Meeting in Houston, TX. The talk was based on work that Trenton Franz has been conducting to see the degree to which root dynamics within dry soils can confound soil moisture observations based on time domain reflectrometry. Trenton has shown that for typically dry sandy loam soils, root mass of even 5% by volume can have significant impacts on estimates of soil moisture using hand-held TDR probes. More generally, we are hoping to be able to link our research on belowground patterns of root structure to these methods in order to further constrain observed variation in soil moisture within dryland ecosystems.