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It is important to know how soil moisture content varies at different spatial and temporal scales. This information is necessary to design efficient networks to monitor soil moisture content in specific circumstances (eg at the field scale as an input to a catchment-scale hydrological model or at finer scales where variations in water content might influence the risk of landslides) and to integrate the output from soil moisture sensors with other larger-scale sources of information such as satellite images. In October 2011 a semi-wireless network of soil moisture sensors was installed on a steep (average slope 20 degrees), hillslope (4.5 hectares) in North Yorkshire, UK. The soil has formed predominately from a fine-grained mudstone parent material with a large proportion of expansive clay minerals. Decagon sensors (5TE) were placed 10 cm beneath the surface of the mineral soil at 96 separate locations (eight clusters each …