The Patitapu Soil Moisture Network (PTSMN) dataset and its deployment in New Zealand’s hill country

A significant portion of New Zealand’s beef and sheep pastoral farming systems are located in the East Coast hill country of the North Island. In these landscapes, one of the main drivers of pasture growth is the highly variable soil water content. Decision making about fertiliser applications, stock and feed budgeting are guided by pasture growth models which rely on soil water information. However, due to the difficulties related to conventional soil moisture data collection, soil water dynamics are still poorly understood in hill country. To capture spatial and temporal soil moisture variability on diverse terrain positions, a soil moisture monitoring network was established at the field scale. The Patitapu Soil Moisture Network (PTSMN) is composed of twenty multi-sensor probes, collecting data from four consecutive depths at 0.1 m intervals. The paper describes the PTSMN deployment and the strategic selection of sensor locations through an extensive spatial analysis and discusses the challenges associated with the network deployment in an operating hill country farm. Additionally, we demonstrate the non-normal nature of soil moisture distribution and that Year 1 and Year 2 showed similarly shaped density curves in the 0.2 − 0.4 m soil depths indicating temporal stability. Similar magnitudes of temporal stability suggested the PTMSN is a temporally stable network although stability changed with depth. Results indicated that soil moisture variability decreased with depth and that higher mean soil moisture content was associated with low variability. Descending and ascending transition stages, i.e., drying, and rewetting periods resulted in the highest spatial variability. As PTSMN is a member of the International Soil Moisture Network, the calibrated, quality checked 2-year dataset has been made accessible online. The presented soil moisture dataset is expected to contribute to the research of near-surface and root-zone soil water dynamics and to assist with the establishment of future networks.