Spatiotemporal soil and saprolite moisture dynamics across a semi-arid woody plant gradient

Recharge estimation and soil moisture dynamics in a Mediterranean, semi-arid karst region

Knowledge of soil moisture dynamics in the unsaturated soil zone provides valuable information on the temporal and spatial variability of groundwater recharge. This is especially true for the Mediterranean region, where a substantial fraction of long-term groundwater recharge is expected to occur during high magnitude precipitation events of aboveaverage wet winters. To elucidate process unders...

Soil Moisture Measurements by Synthetic Aperture Radar and Scatterometers in the Arid and Semi-arid Environment

Water is a scarce commodity in desert regions; yet, most remote sensing experiments of soil moisture have been conducted in temperate areas. The ability to detect and reliably assess soil moisture in the arid environment has important implications both at the micro scale such as the individual farm and at the macro scale for climate modeling. A series of experiments utilizing an airborne scatte...

Soil Moisture Dynamics Across Landscape Types in an Arid Inland River Basin of Northwest China

s: A combination of field measurements, continuous monitoring, and numerical modeling were used to evaluate soil moisture regimes at four sites across a landscape gradient of the Heihe River Basin (HRB). Recorded data of precipitation, irrigation, and floods were used to build the model, and an optimization technique was employed to calibrate the parameters. Based on the optimized parameters an...

Controls on Patterns of Soil Moisture in Arid and Semi-arid Systems

Shifting soil resource limitations and ecosystem retrogression across a three million year semi-arid substrate age gradient

The current paradigm of plant nutrient limitation during ecosystem development predicts a change from nitrogen (N) limitation when substrates are young to phosphorus (P) limitation when substrates are old. However, there are surprisingly few direct tests of this model. We evaluated this theory experimentally along a three million year semi-arid substrate age gradient using resource additions to...