Wildfires can create or intensify water repellency in soil, limiting the soil's capacity to wet and retain water. The objective of this research was to quantify soil water repellency characteristics within burned piñon-juniper woodlands and relate this information to ecological site characteristics. We sampled soil water repellency across forty-one 1,000 m2 study plots within three major wildfi...

Aquatic flow over a submerged vegetation canopy is a ubiquitous example of flow adjacent to a permeable medium. Aquatic canopy flows, however, have two important distinguishing features. Firstly, submerged vegetation typically grows in shallow regions. Consequently, the roughness sublayer, the region where the drag length scale of the canopy is dynamically important, can often encompass the ent...

The rapid decline in the extent and health of coastal salt marshes has created a need for nondestructive methods for evaluating the condition of salt marsh ecosystems. This paper describes simultaneous uses of field sampling and remote sensing approaches to understand salt marsh ecosystem functions and species distributions and discusses the implications for salt marsh monitoring using remote s...

Both Imaging Spectrometry and LIDAR have been already investigated as independent data sources to describe and quantify forests properties. While Imaging Spectrometry provides information on the biochemical and biophysical properties of the canopy, LIDAR resolves the spatial and vertical distribution of the canopy structure (1, 2). The presented contribution outlines a concept how these two com...

Plant hydraulic conductance (k s) is a critical control on whole-plant water use and carbon uptake and, during drought, influences whether plants survive or die. To assess long-term physiological and hydraulic responses of mature trees to water availability, we manipulated ecosystem-scale water availability from 2007 to 2013 in a piñon pine (Pinus edulis) and juniper (Juniperus monosperma) wood...

We investigated relationships between tree water status, vegetative growth and leaf gas exchange of peach trees growing on different rootstocks under field conditions. Tree water status was manipulated by partially covering (0, approximately 30 and approximately 60%) the tree canopies on individual days and then evaluating the effects of tree water status on vegetative growth and leaf gas excha...

Stomatal conductance controls carbon and water fluxes in forest ecosystems. Therefore, its accurate characterization in land-surface flux models is necessary. Sap-flux scaled canopy conductance was used to evaluate the effect of drought, disturbance, and mortality of three oak species (Quercus prinus, Q. velutina, and Q. coccinea) in an upland oak/pine stand in the New Jersey Pine Barrens from ...

Vegetation affects water balance of the land surface by e.g. storage of precipitation water in the canopy and soil water extraction by transpiration. Therefore, it is essential to consider the role of vegetation in affecting water balance by taking into account the temporal dynamics of e.g. leaf area index, rooting depth and stomatal conductance in hydrological models. However until now, most c...

Spectral reflectance of plant canopies provides an accurate indication of ground cover fraction, which is highly correlated with radiation capture. If nutrients and water do not limit growth, radiation capture is highly correlated with daily growth rate and ultimate yield. However, if nutrients and water limit growth, none of the common spectral indices are able to separate a more developed, st...