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Due to their unique characteristics, cosmic-ray neutron sensors (CRNSs) have potential in monitoring and informing irrigation management, and thus optimising the use of water resources in agriculture. However, practical methods to monitor small, irrigated fields with CRNSs are currently not available and the challenges of targeting areas smaller than the CRNS sensing volume are mostly unaddressed. In this study, CRNSs are used to continuously monitor soil moisture (SM) dynamics in two irrigated apple orchards (Agia, Greece) of ~1.2 ha. The CRNS-derived SM was compared to a reference SM obtained by weighting a dense sensor network. In the 2021 irrigation period, CRNSs could only capture the timing of irrigation events, and an ad hoc calibration resulted in improvements only in the hours before irrigation (RMSE between 0.020 and 0.035). In 2022, a correction based on neutron transport simulations, and on SM measurements from a non-irrigated location, was tested. In the nearby irrigated field, the proposed correction improved the CRNS-derived SM (from 0.052 to 0.031 RMSE) and, most importantly, allowed for monitoring the magnitude of SM dynamics that are due to irrigation. The results are a step forward in using CRNSs as a decision support system in irrigation management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate soil moisture (SM) monitoring is key in irrigation as it can greatly improve water use efficiency. Recently, Cosmic-Ray Neutron Sensors (CRNS) have been recognized as a promising tool in SM monitoring due to their large footprint of several hectares. CRNS have great potential for irrigation applications, but few studies have investigated whether irrigation monitoring with CRNS is feasible, especially for irrigated fields with a size smaller than the CRNS footprint. Therefore, the aim of this work is to use Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the feasibility of monitoring irrigation with CRNS. This was achieved by simulating irrigation scenarios with different field dimensions (from 0.5 ha to 8 ha) and SM variations between 0.05 and 0.50 cm³ cm-3. Moreover, the energy dependent response functions of eight moderators with different high-density polyethylene (HDPE) thickness or additional gadolinium thermal shielding were investigated. It was found that a considerable part of the neutrons that contribute to the CRNS footprint can originate outside an irrigated field, which is a challenge for irrigation monitoring with CRNS. The use of thin HDPE moderators (e.g., 5 mm) generally resulted in a smaller footprint and thus stronger contributions from the irrigated area. However, a thicker 25 mm HDPE moderator with gadolinium shielding improved SM monitoring in irrigated fields due to a higher sensitivity of neutron counts with changing SM. Such moderator and shielding provided high chances of detecting irrigation events, especially when the initial SM was relatively low. However, it was found that variations in SM outside a small, irrigated field (i.e., 0.5 and 1 ha) can affect the count rate more than SM variations due to irrigation. This suggests the importance of retrieving SM data from the surrounding of a target field to obtain more meaningful information for supporting irrigation management, especially for small irrigated fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]