近日，美国华盛顿大学Marine A. Denolle团队研究了农业地震学和耕作方式对土壤水动力学的影响。该项研究成果发表在2026年3月19日出版的《科学》杂志上。

农业实践对土壤水动力学的影响，对于理解占全球宜居土地近一半的农业景观至关重要。通过将分布式声学传感观测与基于物理的水力学建模相结合，研究组以分钟级分辨率、米级尺度监测了具有可控耕作与压实历史的农田地块中的地震与水文变化。

研究组表明，土壤中的动态毛细效应决定了扰动土壤中瞬时的刚度变化与水分再分布，导致降雨后因近地表饱和而产生急剧的速度下降，以及受蒸散发驱动的巨大滞后性速度回升。通过地震反演得到的饱和度估算揭示了土壤扰动如何改变水分通量分配与储存，从而确立农业地震学与分布式声学传感作为可扩展、非侵入式土壤水力学探测手段的潜力，有望改进地球系统模型、土地管理及灾害应对能力。

附：英文原文

Title: Agroseismology and the impact of farming practices on soil hydrodynamics

Author: Qibin Shi, David R. Montgomery, Abigail L.S. Swann, Nicoleta C. Cristea, Ethan F. Williams, Nan You, Simon Jeffery, Joe Collins, Ana Prada Barrio, Paula A. Misiewicz, Tarje Nissen-Meyer, Marine A. Denolle

Issue&Volume: 2026-03-19

Abstract: Impacts of farming practices on soil hydrodynamics are central to understanding agricultural landscapes covering almost half of the world’s habitable land. Combining observations from distributed acoustic sensing with physics-based hydromechanical modeling, we tracked minute-resolution, meter-scale seismic and hydrological changes across agricultural fields with controlled histories of tillage and compaction. We show that dynamic capillary effects in soil govern transient stiffness and moisture redistribution in disturbed soils, producing sharp post-rain velocity drops from near-surface saturation and large hysteretic velocity rebounds driven by evapotranspiration. Our seismically inverted estimates of saturation reveal how disturbance alters flux partitioning and storage, establishing agroseismology and distributed acoustic sensing as scalable, noninvasive probes of soil hydromechanics with the potential to improve Earth system models, land management, and hazard resilience.

DOI: aec0970

Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec0970