Soil water content monitoring for irrigation management: A geostatistical analysis

•Three or more neutron probe monitoring locations were needed to accurately quantify the areal mean soil water content for management areas greater than 1.4ha.•Stratified soil water content network designs may require reduced numbers of monitoring locations for management areas of 1.4ha or less.•Locations that were temporally stable for volumetric water content were identified for both profile average and shallow depths.•Ancillary spatial variables were not found to be consistent predictors of mean relative difference in the study field. With the increasing attention to site-specific or variable rate irrigation management, it is helpful to reconsider the quantity and placement of soil water monitoring locations in this context. Volumetric soil water content (θv) was monitored using a neutron probe (NP) at 72 locations in a center pivot irrigated field in eastern Nebraska. Variance reduction and temporal stability analyses were performed on θv from shallow (∼top 46cm) and full profile (∼122cm) readings for four monitoring cycles in the 2015 growing season and 2016 preseason. Eleven additional cycles were included for a subset of the data for the temporal stability analysis. The spatial correlation scale for θv was found to be less than the closest spacing of monitoring locations in the study (i.e.