I would like to know the methods available for soil water extraction, with special interest for soils with low water content (let's say below plant wilting point), from semiarid regions, for stable isotopes determination.
Dear Arvind, Firoz, and Issam. Thank you very much for your suggested bibliography.
Firoz, thanks for those manuals, unfortunately, in my context (semi-arid) vacuum methods don't work (soil water content usually below 5% for most of the year).
Arvind, I found this paper very nice and I think it will help me in some other studies. But I'm afraid they are not suitable for soils as 'dry' as the ones I'll study.
Issam, the paper you sent me is very useful! It also opened my horizons for further references. I guess the vapor equilibration method is the most suitable for my context.
By now I found a couple of interesting papers on the specific topic of soil water extraction for isotope analysis I think might be useful and/or interesting. Here I list them:
Sprenger, M., Herbstritt, B., and Weiler, M. (2015) Established methods and new opportunities for pore water stable isotope analysis. Hydrol. Process., 29: 5174–5192. doi: 10.1002/hyp.10643.
Hendry, M. J. and Schmeling, E. and Wassenaar, L. I. and Barbour, S. L. and Pratt, D. Determining the stable isotope composition of pore water from saturated and unsaturated zone core: improvements to the direct vapour equilibration laser spectrometry method. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 2015 http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/19/4427/2015/ 10.5194/hess-19-4427-2015
Wassenaar LI, Hendry MJ, Chostner VL, Lis GP. 2008. High resolution pore water δ2H and δ18O measurements by H2O (liquid)–H2O (vapor) equilibration laser spectroscopy. Environmental Science and Technology 42(24): 9262–9267. DOI:10.1021/es802065s. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es802065s
Paul Koeniger, Marcel Gaj, Matthias Beyer and Thomas Himmelsbach
Review on soil water isotope-based groundwater recharge estimations (pages 2817–2834) Version of Record online: 13 APR 2016 | DOI: 10.1002/hyp.10775