Soil Moisture as the Global Environmental Integrator.

Soil moisture is emerging, across earth system science, as a fundamental integrator of hydrological, biogeochemical and ecological processes at a range of scales from local to continental. Yet our ability to describe and monitor soil moisture processes is contingent on increasing soil water monitoring capacity. The main goal of the paper is to improve the awareness of the environmental science community on the extreme relevance of soil moisture and its monitoring; and to report on recent innovative measurement techniques and observation networks, as supported by big science funding.