The Space–Time Distribution of Soil Water and Temperature of a Desert Ecosystem Using Spatio-Temporal Kriging and PCA Analysis

Straw checkerboard and vegetation restoration are used for soil and water conservation on this area. This study presents soil moisture and temperature spatial distribution in different seasons from the restoration sites using the geostatistical analysis expansion module of ArcGIS. The results suggested that the soil temperature shows an overall decreasing trend accompanied with the increasing of the depth in June and August; while, there was no obvious temperature differences among all the depths of September. In addition, the humidity in August and September increased with the increase of depth. However, the mean soil moisture of June did not follow any rules. The spatial distributions of soil temperature were high in the south of the survey area. Compared with the temperature, the spatial distribution of moisture shows a much larger variation. Principal component analysis was also used in this study. The results showed the high similarity of temperatures with different depths, while the soil moisture showed an obvious spatial differences between deep and top layers. Taking a shifting sand dune as the control area, we examined the effects of ecological restoration project on soil temperature and moisture of the study area. The data indicated a remarkable environmental improvement in the restoration area.