Different management strategies exert distinct influences on microclimate of soil and canopy in tea fields through surface-atmosphere interactions

Abstract

Agricultural management strategies are crucial in regulating the soil-atmosphere interaction. The crop landscape is influenced by farmers through different field practices, and further impacts the variations of soil temperature, soil moisture, and field microclimate. To examine how different management strategies affect the dynamics of canopy and soil parameters (canopy temperature, soil temperature and soil moisture) and the aforementioned interaction, two observation systems were installed in an organic-certified (ORG) tea field and a conventional (CONV) tea field in northern Taiwan. Due to the application of different field practices, the leaf area in ORG is higher. The results show that the diurnal range of canopy temperature in CONV was larger than that in ORG (7.52 °C vs 5.97 °C). However, the daily loss rate of soil water content in ORG was two times faster than that in CONV (0.97% d−1 vs. 0.45% d−1). The outcomes imply that the organic practices in this study lead to higher evapotranspiration and milder variation in temperature on the canopy scale. These findings suggest that the application of organic practice could help to mitigate the changes of microclimate in tea field. In addition, the adoption of appropriate management strategies could assist farmers in adapting to environmental fluctuations and provide quantitative references of microclimate in tea field under different agricultural applications and climatic conditions.

Keywords

• Organic farming
• Agricultural management
• Plant-soil feedback (PSF)
• Evapotranspiration (ET)
• Eddy-covariance (EC)