The carbon isotopic composition (delta(13)C) of recently assimilated plant carbon is known to depend on water-stress, caused either by low soil moisture or by low atmospheric humidity. Air humidity has also been shown to correlate with the delta(13)C of soil respiration, which suggests indirectly that recently fixed photosynthates comprise a substantial component of substrates consumed by soil ...

Traditional instrumentation based on discrete and wired solutions, presents many difficulties to measure or to compute plant physiological responses due to the large geographical areas that may be involved. This paper describes an implementation of a wireless sensor network for agriculture low data-rate applications. This network includes several solar powered wireless acquisition stations used...

A set of Essential Climate Variables (ECV) have been defined to be monitored by current and new remote sensing missions. The ECV retrieved at global scale need to be validated in order to provide reliable products to be used in remote sensing applications. For this, test sites are required to use in calibration and validation of the remote sensing approaches in order to improve the ECV retrieva...

The capability of L band wavelengths to register the soil emission over sparse to moderately dense forests makes attractive the comparative study of the soil moisture content and vegetation biophysical parameter. Soil and vegetation conditions contribute to the microwave measurements through complex interactions, basically resulting from vegetation structure and from moisture content and roughn...

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...

Soil amino acids are often an important source of nitrogen (N) for plants, and anticipated global changes, including climate warming and rising atmospheric CO2 levels, have the potential to alter plant and microbial production and consumption of this N source in soils. We determined soil amino acid composition over a 1-year period at diurnal and seasonal time scales in a multi-factor global cha...

The responses of soil respiration to environmental conditions have been studied extensively in various ecosystems. However, little is known about the impacts of temperature and moisture on soils respiration under biological soil crusts. In this study, CO2 efflux from biologically-crusted soils was measured continuously with an automated chamber system in Ningxia, northwest China, from June to O...

Intact soil cores from three adjacent sites (Site A: grazed, Site B: fenced for 4 years, and Site C: fenced for 24 years) were incubated in the laboratory to examine effects of temperature, soil moisture, and their interactions on net nitrification and N mineralization rates in the Inner Mongolia grassland of Northern China. Incubation temperature significantly influenced net nitrification and ...