• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.233-246
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• 2023

In terms of understanding the water cycle and efficient water resource management, the importance of soil moisture has been highlighted. However, in Korea, the lack of qualified in-situ soil moisture data results in very limited utility. Even if satellite-based data are applied, the absence of ground reference data makes objective evaluation and correction difficult. The cosmic-ray neutron probe (CRNP) can play a key role in producing data for satellite data calibration. The installation of CRNP is non-invasive, minimizing damage to the soil and vegetation environment, and has the advantage of having a spatial representative for the intermediate scale. These characteristics are advantageous to establish an observation network in Korea which has lots of mountainous areas with dense vegetation. Therefore, this study was conducted to evaluate the applicability of the CRNP soil moisture observatory in Korea as part of the establishment of a Korean cOsmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing System (KOSMOS). The CRNP observation station was installed with the Gunup-ri observation station, considering the ease of securing power and installation sites and the efficient use of other hydro-meteorological factors. In order to evaluate the CRNP soil moisture data, 12 additional in-situ soil moisture sensors were installed, and spatial representativeness was evaluated through a temporal stability analysis. The neutrons generated by CRNP were found to be about 1,087 counts per hour on average, which was lower than that of the Solmacheon observation station, indicating that the Hongcheon observation station has a more humid environment. Soil moisture was estimated through neutron correction and early-stage calibration of the observed neutron data. The CRNP soil moisture data showed a high correlation with r=0.82 and high accuracy with root mean square error=0.02 m³/m³ in validation with in-situ data, even in a short calibration period. It is expected that higher quality soil moisture data production with greater accuracy will be possible after recalibration with the accumulation of annual data reflecting seasonal patterns. These results, together with previous studies that verified the excellence of CRNP soil moisture data, suggest that high-quality soil moisture data can be produced when constructing KOSMOS.

• Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.31-40
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• 2022

Background: Plant vegetation appears in heterogeneous and patchy forms in arid and semi-arid regions. In these regions, underneath the plant patches and the empty spaces between them are covered by biological soil crusts (moss, lichen, cyanobacteria, and fungi). Biological soil crusts lead to the formation and development of fertile islands in between vegetation patches via nitrogen and carbon fixation and the permeation of runoff water and nutrients in the soil. Results: The present study has investigated the association of biological soil crusts, the development of fertile islands, and the formation of plant patches in part of the Takht-e Soltan protected area, located in Khorasan Razavi Province, Iran. Three sites were randomly selected as the working units and differentiated based on their geomorphological characteristics to the alluvial fan, hillslope, and fluvial terrace landforms. Two-step systematic random sampling was conducted along a 100-meter transect using a 5 m² plot at a 0-5 cm depth in three repetitions. Fifteen samplings were carried out at each site with a total of 45 samples taken. The results showed that the difference in altitude has a significant relationship with species diversity and decreases with decreasing altitude. Results have revealed that the moisture content of the site, with biocrust has had a considerable increase compared to the other sites, helping to form vegetation patterns and fertile islands. Conclusions: The findings indicated that biological crusts had impacted the allocation of soil parameters. They affect the formation of plant patches by increasing the soil's organic carbon, nitrogen, moisture and nutrient content provide a suitable space for plant growth by increasing the soil fertility in the inter-patch space.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.4B
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• pp.345-354
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• 2006

Drought brings on long term damage in contrast to flood, on economic loss in the region, and on ecologic and environmental disruptions. Drought is one of major natural disasters and gives a painful hardship to human beings. So we have tried to quantify the droughts for reducing drought damage and developed the drought indices for drought monitoring and management. The Palmer's drought severity index (PDSI) is widely used for the drought monitoring but it has the disadvanges and limitations in that the PDSI is estimated by considering just climate conditions as pointed out by many researchers. Thus this study uses the SWAT model which can consider soil conditions like soil type and land use in addition to climate conditions. We estimate soil water (SW) and soil moisture index (SMI) by SWAT which is a long term runoff simulation model. We apply the SWAT model to Soyang dam watershed for SMI estimation and compare SMI with PDSI for drought analysis. Say, we calibrate and validate the SWAT model by daily inflows of Soyang dam site and we estimate long term daily soil water. The estimated soil water is used for the computation of SMI based on the soil moisture deficit and we compare SMI with PDSI. As the results, we obtained the determination coefficient of 0.651 which means the SWAT model is applicable for drought monitoring and we can monitor drought in more high resolution by using GIS. So, we suggest that SMI based on the soil moisture deficit can be used for the drought monitoring and management.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.66 no.1
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• pp.87-96
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• 2021

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) remote soil moisture control system including soil sensing, automatic water supply chain, and remote alarming system was established on reclaimed land and operated stably. The system was operated using river water around the reclaimed land without fertilizer. On applying this system to control soil moisture, the kenaf germination rate was improved up to two times. Kenaf biomass was 4,748 kg/10a and was higher than that of untreated soil moisture management. When the nutritious liquid fertilizer was used, kenaf yield reached 8,390 kg/10a, which was lower than 10,848 kg/10a of the non-reclaimed land treated with standard chemical fertilizers. As the soil moisture was managed stably through the ICT remote soil moisture control system, the quality of the kenaf crop was improved, resulting in a 7% increase in dry weight, and a 11.5% increase in plant hardness. The estimated kenaf yield was 5,039 kg/10a when 800 tonnes of water were supplied by the ICT remote soil moisture control system with the stream water around Saemangeum reclaimed land without chemical fertilizers and organic matter.

• Korean Journal of Weed Science
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.206-214
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• 2010

The laboratory and green house studies evaluated the effect of three different environmental factors on the seed germination, seedling emergence and survival of four major weed species in coconut plantations, Mimosa pudica, Ureana lobata, Panicum maximum and Pennisetum polystachyon. Germination percentage of all the weed species was significantly reduced with increasing soil moisture stress, no germination was observed at -0.9 MPa. Germination of both grass seeds ranged from 8% to 25% and 10% to 45% as moisture stress decreased from -0.4 MPa to 0 MPa, respectively. In contrast, seeds of M. pudica, and U. lobata were moderately tolerant to soil moisture stress and best adapted to moist environment. All the weed species seeds germinated over a wide range of soil pH values with the highest germination occurring at pH 6. In all the species, seedling emergence was declined rapidly with increasing depth with the exception of U. lobata. Seedling emergence significantly declined when the duration of flooding was three days or longer in dicotyledonous weed species and two days or longer in monocotyledonous weeds. This study illustrates the adaptability of these weeds to different environmental conditions which would enable the development of management strategies to reduce their populations below economic threshold levels in coconut plantations.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.60 no.1
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• pp.21-30
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• 2018

In this study, we developed the Soil Moisture Data Assimilation (SMDA) scheme to extract Effective Soil Characteristics-ESC (Sand, Silt, Clay %) from MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) products. The SMDA scheme was applied to the MODIS-based Soil Moisture (SM) data during the summer (July to September) period. Then the ESC and soil erosion factors (K) were predicted, respectively. Several numerical experiments were conducted to test the performance of SMDA at the study sites under the synthetic and field validation conditions. In the synthetic experiment, the estimated soil moistures values(R: >0.990 and RMSE: <0.005) were identified well with the synthetic observations. The field validation results at the Bangdongri and Chungmicheon sites were also comparable to the TDR-based measurements with the statistics (R: 0.772/0.000 and RMSE: 0.065/0.000). The estimated ESC values were also matched well with the measurements for the synthetic and field validation conditions. Then we tested the SMDA scheme to extract the ESC from the MODIS-based soil moisture products. Although uncertainties exist in the results, the estimated soil moisture and ESC based on the SMDA were comparable to the measurements. Overall, the K factors were similarly distributed based on the derived ESC. Also, the K factors in the mountainous regions were higher than those of the relatively flat areas. Thus, the newly developed SMDA scheme can be useful to estimate spatially and temporally-distributed soil erosion and establish soil erosion management plans.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.21-29
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• 2004

The growth of water resources engineering associated with stable supply, management, development is essential to overcome the coming water deficit of our country. Large scale remote sensing and the analysis of sub-pixel variability of soil moisture fields are necessary in order to understand water cycle and to develop appropriate hydrologic model. The target resolution of coming Global monitoring of soil moisture field is about 10km which is not appropriate for the regional scale hydrologic model. Therefore, we need a downscaling scheme to generate hydrologic variables which are suitable for the regional hydrologic model. The results of the analysis of sub-pixel soil moisture variability show that the relationship between ancillary data and soil moisture fields shows there is very weak linear relationship. A downscaling scheme was developed using physically-based classification scheme and Neural Networks which are able to link the nonlinear relationship between ancillary data and soil moisture fields. The model is demonstrated by downscaling soil moisture fields from 4km to 0.2km resolution using remotely-sensed data from the Washita'92 experiment.

• Journal of Construction Engineering and Project Management
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.45-52
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• 2012

This study introduces a methodology to evaluate different types of non-nuclear technologies to see how they are competitive to the nuclear technology for quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) in soil condition measurement for highway pavement construction. The non-nuclear methods including the Electrical Density Gauge (EDG) and the Light Weight Deflectometer (LWD) were tested for their performance against a nuclear gauge, and traditional methods were used as baselines. An innovative way of comparing a deflection gauge to a density gauge was introduced. Results showed that the nuclear gauge generally outperformed the non-nuclear gauge in accuracies of soil density and moisture content measurements. Finally, a framework was developed as a guideline for evaluating various types of non-nuclear soil gauges. From other perspectives rather than accuracy, it was concluded that the non-nuclear gauges would be better alternative to the nuclear gauge when the followings are considered: (1) greater life-cycle cost savings; (2) elimination of intense federal regulations and safety/security concerns; and (3) elimination of licensing and intense training.

• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.211-214
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• 1999

To acknowledge the differences in soil physical properties of cultivated land derived from major parent rocks in Yeong-nam areas, we investigated Riley's projection sphericity(one of the morphological properties) of sand and made up Soil Moisture Characteristics Curve(SMCC). The averages in Riley s projection sphericity range from 0.63 to 0.67 in soils derived from Sedimentary rocks than 0.56 to 0.61 in soils derived from igneous rocks. In case of soils derived from igneous rocks, the Riley's projection sphericity is lower as the particle size get to be smaller. The differences of SMCC were larger in the fine loamy soils than in coarse loamy soils. The moisture retention was higher in the soils derived from Sedimentary rocks than in the soils derived from Igneous rocks. After we transformed the water retention into dimensionless scale value by available water ratio, the SMCC was nearly unchangeable in the tested soils except for fine loamy soils derived from Sedimentary rock, but was not correlated with soil texture or parent rocks.

• Journal of Ginseng Research
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.15-23
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• 1985

The study was carried out to confirm the changes of soil physico-chemical properties and population of Fusarium solani by soil managements at preplanning fields for ginseng cultivation. Soil porosity and aggregation had been significantly increased during the managements while exchangeable nitrogen content and bulk density of the soil had been decreased. Available phosphate and exchangeable potassium content, in addition, seemed to be slightly increased. And soil aggregation showed positive correlation with clay, organic matter, soil moisture, and Ca content in the soil but negative with K content. Decrease rate of NH4-N and NO3-N content after soil managements were 55% and 41% in average, respectively. And better decrease effect for NH4-N was obtained in sand loam soil whereas no effect for NO3-N with soil textures. The more ploughing seemed to result in less propagules of F solani in the soil, however there was non significant decrease in population of the pathogen after the soil management. Number of F. solani in soil was significantly less in the fields where gramineous and leguminous crops had been grown as a precrop than other crops tested. Meanwhile there was no correlation between soil texture and population of the pathogen in the soil.