BEIJING, March 21 (Xinhua) -- A global research team has used a new technique to capture minute-scale structural changes in farmland soil, revealing how farming practices influence soil water dynamics.
The team, led by the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, employed distributed fiber-optic sensing, installed across an experimental farm at Harper Adams University in the United Kingdom, to achieve continuous, high-resolution monitoring of soil.
By detecting tiny ground vibrations generated by natural and human activities, the researchers tracked how water moves through soil every single minute.
The findings, published on Friday in the journal Science, address a long-standing challenge in regenerative agriculture -- assessing the impact of tillage on soil structure without disturbing it.
The results show that healthy soil contains a natural internal "plumbing" network composed of microscopic pores and channels that allow water to infiltrate deeply into the ground, where it becomes available to plant roots.
In fields subjected to frequent plowing or heavy tractor traffic, however, this pore network becomes severely disrupted. As a result, rainfall tends to pool near the surface in heavily cultivated soil. Because the water stays shallow, it evaporates rapidly under sunlight, leaving deeper soil layers dry.
In contrast, undisturbed soils act as effective natural filters, rapidly absorbing water and storing it in deeper layers where plants can access it during dry periods.
To explain these observations, the researchers developed a dynamic capillary stress model. "Rather than a simple collection of particles, soil is a porous medium in which the structure functions like capillary vessels within the water cycle," said Shi Qibin, a researcher at the institute.
The findings highlight the need to reconsider how agricultural land is managed. Excessive tillage and soil compaction from heavy machinery do not simply rearrange soil particles. Instead, they break the invisible mechanical bonds that allow soil to breathe, circulate water and maintain ecological stability.
Preserving these natural structures will be critical in helping crops adapt to the increasingly extreme weather conditions caused by climate change.
By bridging seismology and agricultural science, this study offers a new perspective on the relationship between plants and soil. This emerging approach uses distributed fiber-optic sensing to assess the health of soil water systems without physically disturbing the land.
By "listening" to the Earth in this way, scientists and farmers may soon be able to assess the condition of agricultural soils in real time and develop more resilient strategies for sustainable food production.
The research was conducted in collaboration with the University of Washington (UW), Rice University, Harper Adams University, the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), Purdue University and University of Exeter. ■
