Prediction of soil characteristics over large areas is desirable for environmental modeling. In arid environments, soil characteristics often show strong ecological connectivity with natural vegetation, specifically biomass and/or canopy cover, suggesting that the soil characteristics may be predicted from vegetation data. The objective of this study was to predict soil infiltration characteris...

Hydrological modeling of the unsaturated soil zone fluxes allows the transfer processes simulation through the hydrological active soil zone. The pedotransfer functions (FTP) are useful tools in the modeling process. They contain analytical functions derived through statistic optimization process using a large amount of soil information data. This paper aims to analyze the level of reliability ...

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. [1] Atmospheric models include land surface parameteriza-tions of heat and moisture fluxes. Most parameterizations ...

Ecological processes regulating soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycles are still poorly understood, especially in the world's largest agricultural frontier in Southern Amazonia. We analyzed soil parameters in samples from pristine rainforest and after land use change to pasture and crop fields, and correlated them with abundance of functional and phylogenetic marker genes (amoA, nirK, nirS, no...

The spatiotemporal distribution of soil moisture over the Tibetan Plateau is important for understanding the regional water cycle and climate change. In this paper, the surface soil moisture in the northeastern Tibetan Plateau is estimated from time-series VV-polarized Sentinel-1A observations by coupling the water cloud model (WCM) and the advanced integral equation model (AIEM). The vegetatio...

Soil moisture retrieval from SAR images using semi-empirical or physically-based backscatter models requires surface roughness parameters, generally obtained by means of in situ measurements. However, measured roughness parameters often result in inaccurate soil moisture contents. Furthermore, when these retrieved soil moisture contents need to be used in data assimilation schemes, it is import...

In the ongoing research, an approximate, grading entropy based, advanced interpolation method is applied to establish empirical functions between curves and model parameters of sands. The space grain size distribution with N fractions isomorphic unit-sided simplex dimension -1. traditional over -1 problematic since number sub-simplexes (and points) may increase exponentially . To overcome this ...

Linear alkylbenzene sulfonates (LAS) may occur in sewage sludge that is applied to agricultural soil, in which LAS can be inhibitory to biological activity. As a part of a broader risk assessment of LAS in the terrestrial environment, we tested the short-term effects of aqueous LAS on microbial parameters in a sandy agricultural soil that was incubated for up to 11 d. The assays included 10 mic...