There’s a lot to consider when collecting soil moisture measurements. Get your soil moisture questions answered in our Office Hours series. Join Environment Support Manager, Chris Chambers, and Director of Science Outreach, Leo Rivera, as they discuss submitted questions all about getting the best soil moisture measurements. In the full episode, they discuss:  How difficult is the calibration of dielectric sensors?  How does soilless media affect the operation of dielectric sensors?  How much can organic soil amendments influence soil moisture?  Is it possible to determine ..read more

University of Idaho graduate student, Adrianne Zuckerman, is taking a different approach to stream restoration than the traditional approach, channel manipulation, which often requires heavy equipment and major disruption to the riparian area. Zuckerman set out to understand how vegetation lining the stream bank impacts habitat quality for anadromous salmon and steelhead in Washington’s Methow River, which flows through the eastern Cascades. Zuckerman wanted to know how tree species composition affects the amount of nutrients available to the benthic insect community, since they are ..read more

What impact does direct solar radiation have on the overall radiation balance? Dr. Colin Campbell, WSU Environmental Biophysics professor and METER scientist, shows you how to do the calculations in our latest chalk talk. Transcript Hi, I’m Dr. Colin Campbell. And this is a METER Chalk Talk. Have you ever been outside on a hot day walking in the full sun and then stepped into the shade? The relief is almost immediate. And I was thinking about that a lot when I was looking at this graph here, the estimated crop water loss on one of my experiments. So this is an ET zero, meaning a reference ET ..read more

Listen to Dr. Colin Campbell, WSU environmental biophysics professor, as he discusses how to calculate the angle of the sun, or solar zenith angle. Transcription Hi, I’m Dr. Colin Campbell. And this is a METER Chalk Talk. A couple of years ago, I was heading out into the backcountry and we wanted to figure out what kind of gear we should take along. A friend suggested we should just check the wind chill factor. But when I looked into it, we found out that it doesn’t even consider solar radiation in that calculation. Our exchange of energy in the environment is highly dependent on radiation, p ..read more

Champions of water potential Drs. Kim Novick and Jessica Guo team up to discuss the vital role water potential measurement plays in both plant and soil sciences and the work they are doing to establish the first-of-its-kind nationwide water potential network. Join their discussion to understand how a communal knowledge of these measurements could impact what we know about climate change and ecology as a whole. A water potential measurement network could increase our understanding of climate change and ecology. Listen to the podcast→ Notes Dr. Kim Novick is a professor, Paul H. O’Neill Cha ..read more

Like a silent battle cry, plants call out to signal they are under siege as a warning to other plants and to call in reinforcements to fend off the invasion. Listen to research on pathogen infection, water stress, and how plants communicate and defend themselves. How does this communication work? What else are plants doing to protect themselves from disease and predators alike? In our latest podcast, Natalie Aguirre, a PhD candidate and plant physiology and chemical ecology researcher at Texas A&M University, dives into her research on pathogen infection, water stress, and how plants ..read more

As world water demand increases and supplies decrease, how can we turn more of the water we use for agriculture into biomass? In this webinar, Dr. Campbell dives deep into the measurement and implications of making the most of every drop of water. Learn how to measure the amount of water a crop will need. Crops turn sunlight, water, carbon dioxide, and nutrients into food The availability of those resources puts limitations on the amount of food a crop can produce. A previous webinar considered the limitations of sunlight. In this 30-minute webinar, world-renown environmental biophysicist ..read more

CONTRIBUTORS Abiotic stress in plants: How to assess it the right way As a plant researcher, you need to effectively assess crop performance, whether you’re  selecting the best variety, trying to understand abiotic stress tolerance, studying disease resistance, or determining climate resilience. But if you’re only measuring weather data, you might be missing key performance indicators. Water potential is underutilized by plant researchers in abiotic stress studies even though it is the only way to assess true drought conditions when determining drought tolerance in pla ..read more

In our latest podcast, Dr. Bruce Bugbee, Professor of Crop Physiology and Director of the Crop Physiology Lab at Utah State University, discusses his space farming research and what we earthlings can learn from space farming techniques.  International space station Find out what happens to plants in a zero-gravity environment and how scientists overcome the particular challenges of deploying measurement sensors in space. He also shares his research on the efficacy of LED lights for indoor growing. Listen now→ Notes Dr. Bruce Bugbee is a Professor of Crop Physiology, Di ..read more

In this chalk talk video, world-renowned soil physicist, Dr. Gaylon Campbell, discusses how many measurements researchers and growers need to characterize soil moisture at a field or research site. He explores the question: What is the relationship between the measurements that you make and the underlying value of water content in the field? Presenter Dr. Gaylon S. Campbell has been a research scientist and engineer at METER for 19 years following nearly 30 years on faculty at Washington State University.  Dr. Campbell’s first experience with environmental measurement came in the lab of ..read more