Prioritizing soil moisture network development across the continental United States

Soil moisture networks are developed in a variety of ways, for many different purposes. This causes the distribution and coverage of the stations to be non-uniform and sub-optimal for coordinated soil moisture monitoring at large scales. For better deployment of future network resources, a detailed gap analysis of soil moisture station coverage must be conducted to understand what hydrologic regions, ecosystems, and populations have deficient representation at the national scale. This gap analysis will consider hydrologic and climatologic distributions, as well as how different soils and ecosystems are monitored. Further analysis will try to understand how the existing distribution impacts services to the different populations and sectors within the U.S., including forestry, agriculture, and rangelands.