Soil moisture variations at different topographic domains and land use types in the semi-arid Loess Plateau, China

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Soil moisture plays a fundamental role in eco-hydrological processes in the semi-arid Loess Plateau. Catchments on the Loess Plateau can be generally divided into the hillslope domain and gully domain. However, the soil moisture variations linked to topographic domains and land use types remain poorly understood. Therefore, in this study, differences in soil moisture among three typical land use types (forestland, native grassland, and farmland) were investigated and compared between the spatial domains of hillslope and gully in the Jiegou catchment on the semi-arid Loess Plateau of China. Additionally, the spatial variations in the soil moisture of the 0–100 cm layers were explored in both wet and dry periods to evaluate the seasonal effects of different spatial domains and land use types. The results showed that including gully soil moisture weakly increased the spatially averaged soil moisture in the catchment but obviously increased the variability during wet periods. In contrast, the spatial means decreased weakly while the variability obviously decreased during dry periods. Soil moisture in forestland was lower than that in native grassland and farmland at all spatial domains during both wet and dry periods. The results also indicated that surface soil moisture (0–10 cm) differs between spatial domains but not land use types, which mainly due to the differences of evapotranspiration on the two topographic domains. In contrast, deep soil moisture (80–100 cm) differs among land use types but not spatial domains, which because of the differences of root water uptake among land use types. In addition, slope aspect played a more important role than slope gradient and elevation in the distribution of soil moisture at the hillslope domain. This was because the slope aspect affected the ground temperature by receiving different solar radiation, and further affected the soil evaporation and vegetation transpiration. Therefore, the results of this study indicates that both topographic domains and land use types should be considered when attempting to characterize soil moisture variability or modelling surface hydrological processes at catchment scale in heavily gullied regions.