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Case Study 4 - Soil Moisture Profiles
BackgroundThe UK Government’s 1995 White Paper on Rural England included a proposal to double the area of woodland cover within England by the year 2045. This proposal was made at the same time that the UK was experiencing the driest and warmest summer on record, conditions that led to widespread water supply shortages and costly drought relief operations in some regions. Climate change scenarios suggest that such droughts could become much more frequent over the next 50-100 years. Questions have since been raised (House of Commons Environment Committee, 1996) concerning the possible impacts on UK water resources and the water environment of the combined effects of climate change and such a large expansion in woodland. Recognising these difficulties, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) commissioned studies to investigate the possible range of water resource impacts associated with woodland on chalk and sandstone. In this study (Tadpole), field and modelling studies were used to investigate the possible impacts of afforestation on recharge to sandstone aquifers. Field studies were started at Clipstone Forest in February 1998 and the field observation record extends over a period of four years to March 2002. Instrumentation was installed under four vegetation types (oak, Corsican pine, grassland and heath) to compare the soil water status and the evaporation losses from the different land uses. At each site, the instrumentation comprises a minimum of 5 neutron probe access tubes, with some extending to 9 m depth, together with clusters of equitensiometers, theta probes and manual tensiometers, to provide better temporal and spatial resolution of near surface water contents and water potentials. A second pine site was established in January 2000.
Photographs of the Field Sites
Numerical Model
ResultsClick here for an animation of the soil moistures (0.2MB)
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