abstract to study the effects of four types of mulches including wood chips, municipal compost, sawdust and gravel in three different thicknesses on growth of platanus orientalis during two years, an experiment was conducted in mashhad area with semi-arid climate. the research was conducted as split plot based on a completely randomized block design with four replications. treatments included c...

This paper describes a project for evaluation of global warming's impacts on soil carbon dynamics in Japanese forest ecosystems. We started a soil warming experiment in late 2008 in a 55-year-old evergreen broad-leaved forest at the boundary between the subtropical and warm-temperate biomes in southern Japan. We used infrared carbon-filament heat lamps to increase soil temperature by about 2.5 ...

Soil moisture is a key variable in dryland ecosystems since it determines the occurrence and duration of vegetation water stress and affects the development of weather patterns including rainfall. However, the lack of ground observations of soil moisture and rainfall dynamics in many drylands has long been a major obstacle in understanding ecohydrological processes in these ecosystems. It is al...

FengYun-3B (FY-3B) soil moisture product, retrieved from passive microwave brightness temperature data based on the Qp model, has rarely been applied at the catchment and region scale. One of the reasons for this is its coarse spatial resolution (25-km). The study in this paper presented a new method to obtain a high spatial resolution soil moisture product by downscaling FY-3B soil moisture pr...

Soil moisture is critical parameters in climatic and hydrological modeling and vegetation growth. Ground-based point measurement of soil moisture is liable but expensive and impractical for watershed measurement. Remote sensing measurement has provided thriving perspective for spatial and instantaneous measurement of soil moisture. Microwave measurement is effective and successful for surface s...

Active microwave remote sensing observations hold the potential for efficient and reliable mapping of spatial soil moisture distributions. However, soil moisture retrievals from microwave remote sensing techniques are typically complex because of the inherent difficulty in characterizing the interactions among land surface parameters that contribute to the retrieval process. Therefore adequate ...

Various hydrological models have been developed for estimating root zone soil moisture dynamics. These models, however, incorporated their own parameterization approaches indicating that the output from the different model inherent structures might include uncertainties because we do not know which model structure is correct for describing the real system. More recently, multimodel approaches u...

As a conventional farming practice, tillage has lasted for thousands of years in Loess Plateau, China. Although recent studies show that tillage is a prominent culprit to soil carbon loss in croplands, few studies have investigated the influences of tillage on the responses of soil CO2 efflux (SCE) to soil temperature and moisture. Using a multi-channel automated CO2 efflux chamber system, we m...

Effects of atmospheric humidity and soil moisture content on the relative intensity of chlorophyll fluorescence of cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) exposed to high air temperatures were assessed as a measure of heat stress or injury. 1. After exposure to 25 •Ž (control) and 42•‹, 44•‹ and 46•Ž for two to three hours, the intensity of fluorescence decreased a little at 42•‹ and 44•Ž but markedly at...

Fire-prone forests in the American west are presently slated for extensive fuels reduction treatments, yet the effect on soil CO2 efflux rates, or soil respiration, has received little attention. This study utilizes the homogeneity of a Sierra Nevada ponderosa (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex P. & C. Laws)–Jeffrey pine (Pinus jeffreyi, Grev. & Balf.) plantation to investigate changes in soil respirat...