Van Deventer, HeidiNaidoo, LApleni, PLe Roux, JBlaauw, CiaraNel, Willem AJTema, Thabo H2025-05-122025-05-122025-041816-7969http://hdl.handle.net/10204/14247Surface soil moisture is an essential climate variable (ECV; https://gcos.wmo.int/en/essential-climate-variables/soilmoisture) which is monitored to inform our understanding of changes in the atmosphere and earth. Soil moisture is also an important indicator, in addition to vegetation and soil types, of the presence of a wetland. According to the South African National Water Act, Act 36 of 1998 (RSA, 1998:18), wetlands are defined as ‘land which is transitional between terrestrial and aquatic systems where the water table is usually at or near the surface, or the land is periodically covered with shallow water, and which land in normal circumstances supports or would support vegetation typically adapted to life in saturated soil’. Only the top 50 cm of soil is used for wetland identification and delineation (DWAF, 2005). Therefore, to be able to detect a wetland using soil moisture as an indicator, we should be able to detect and monitor changes in soil moisture up to 50 cm of depth. In South Africa, wetlands make up < 7% of the extent of the land mass, however, we have not detected all our wetlands yet (Van Deventer et al., 2020). Wetlands were also found to be the most threatened realm both globally (IPCC, 2019) as well as in the two South African National Biodiversity Assessments (NBAs) of 2011 (Nel and Driver, 2012) and 2018 (Van Deventer et al., 2019). Detection and monitoring of a wetland’s soil moisture would not only contribute to the improved representation of their extent in the National Wetland Maps of South Africa, but also allow for quantifying changes in extent, health and their hydrological regime (Van Deventer et al., 2021). If these methods can be applied also elsewhere in the world, we can monitor these changes for reporting to global targets of freshwater ecosystems in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF; CBD, 2022).FulltextenSurface soil moistureECVEssential climate variableArticleN/A