This study examined how leaf and stem functional traits related to gas exchange and water balance scale with two potential proxies for tree hydraulic architecture: the leaf area:sapwood area ratio (A(L):A(S)) and wood density (rho(w)). We studied the upper crowns of individuals of 15 tropical forest tree species at two sites in Panama with contrasting moisture regimes and forest types. Transpir...

Quantifying coupled spatio-temporal dynamics of phenology and hydrology and understanding underlying processes is a fundamental challenge in ecohydrology. While variation in phenology and factors influencing it have attracted the attention of ecologists for a long time, the influence of biodiversity on coupled dynamics of phenology and hydrology across a landscape is largely untested. We measur...

Obtaining measurements of the near-surface soil water content from passive microwave observations requires knowledge of the soil effective temperature, which is a function of the soil temperature and moisture profiles. Detailed information on these profiles is not available from airborne remote sensing, but the effective temperature can be estimated via thermal infrared observations of the land...

This paper proposes a novel k-nearest neighbor algorithm to predict soil moisture in maize field. In order to estimate soil moisture in maize field accurately without any destruction to root and soil, this paper uses biological characteristics of maize to estimate soil moisture, including plant height, leaf area, stem diameter, dry weight and fresh weight, all the values of which are non-negati...

Field dry hay needs to be reduced from near 80% moisture to 20% or less to prevent spoilage during storage. Drying hay to safe baling moistures often takes several days. Sources of loss during forage harvest include mechanical losses such as mowing, conditioning, chopping, raking, packaging and handling as well as respiration and leaching. The general relationship between forage moisture concen...

Alterations in global and regional precipitation patterns are expected to affect plant and ecosystem productivity, especially in water-limited ecosystems. This study examined the effects of natural and supplemental (25% increase) seasonal precipitation on a sotol grassland ecosystem in Big Bend National Park in the Chihuahuan Desert. Physiological responses – leaf photosynthesis at saturating l...

Six months-old seminal plants of 36 cacao genotypes grown under greenhouse conditions were subjected to two soil water regimes (control and drought) to assess, the effects of water deficit on growth, chemical composition and oxidative stress. In the control, soil moisture was maintained near field capacity with leaf water potentials (ΨWL) ranging from -0.1 to -0.5 MPa. In the drought treatment,...

A coupled modeling framework including a terrestrial ecosystem model and an atmospheric radiative transfer model is used to evaluate the aerosols’ direct radiative effects on the surface soil moisture in global terrestrial ecosystems during 2003–2010. We conduct two sets of model runs with and without aerosols in a hindcast mode. Comparison analysis indicates that the simulated soil moisture is...

1. INTRODUCTION Deardorff (1978, D78 henceforth) showed that a two-layered force-restore scheme is superior to bulk scheme in describing the surface soil moisture content because it contains the mechanism by which a deeper soil layer can influence the thin surface layer. This gives the flexibility and advantages in superficial soil moisture prediction especially when there are precipitation and...