How farming practices reshape soil hydrodynamics

Farming practices reshape soil hydrodynamics by altering near-surface structure, mechanical stiffness, and water transport pathways, yet their impacts remain difficult to observe at field scale and high temporal resolution. Here we combine distributed acoustic sensing with physics-based hydromechanical modeling to quantify how tillage systems and soil compaction influences minute-scale, meter-scale seismic and hydrological responses in agricultural soils. We show that dynamic capillary effects govern transient soil stiffness and moisture redistribution following rainfall, with disturbed soils exhibiting sharp post-rain seismic velocity reductions associated with near-surface saturation. These responses are followed by pronounced hysteretic velocity recoveries driven by evapotranspiration, revealing strong memory effects in soil–water dynamics. Seismically inverted estimates of soil saturation demonstrate how farming-induced disturbance reshapes water flux partitioning and subsurface storage. Our results provide direct observational evidence that farming practices fundamentally reorganize soil hydrodynamics and establish distributed seismic sensing as a scalable, non-invasive approach for observing  soil processes relevant to land–atmosphere exchange, Earth system modeling, and resilience to hydrological extremes.