Extremes in soil moisture, either too much or too little, present a significant risk to agricultural productivity. Managing and mitigating risk requires information and knowledge to assess risk potential, implement risk reduction strategies and deliver responses to this risk. Synthetic aperture radars (SARs) are sensitive to the dielectric properties of soils and are thus well suited to provide...

This article investigated the long-term variation of the boreal summer (JJA) moisture circulation over South China (SC). The total precipitable water (TPW) and moisture convergence over SC have increased obviously, such trend is not a local phenomenon, but the result of large-scale circulation anomaly. In the past few decades, the water vapor transport from southern hemisphere and subtropical w...

The biodiversity of microbial communities has important implications for the stability and functioning of ecosystem processes. Yet, very little is known about the environmental factors that define the microbial niche and how this influences the composition and activity of microbial communities. In this study, we derived niche parameters from physiological response curves that quantified microbi...

UNLABELLED The aim of this study was to assess occurrence of dampness and mold in school buildings in three European countries (the Netherlands, Spain, and Finland), representing different climatic regions. An assessment was performed utilizing both questionnaires and on-site building investigations, and the agreement between these two methods was evaluated for validation purposes. On the basis...

This work evaluated the capability of (electrochemical) impedance spectroscopy (IS, or ECIS as used here) to monitor damp heat (DH) stability of contact materials, CuInGaSe2 (CIGS) solar cell components, and devices. Cell characteristics and its variation of the CIGS devices were also examined by the ECIS. Bare and encapsulated sample sets were separately prepared and exposed in an environmenta...

Precipitation and temperature drive many aspects of terrestrial ecosystem function. Climate change scenarios predict increasing precipitation variability and temperature, and long term experiments are required to evaluate the ecosystem consequences of interannual climate variation, increased growing season (intra-annual) rainfall variability, and warming. We present results from an experiment a...

17 18 The responses of canopy conductance to variation in solar radiation, vapour pressure deficit and soil 19 moisture have been extensively modelled using a Jarvis-Stewart (JS) model. Modelled canopy 20 conductance has then often been used to predict transpiration using the Penman-Monteith (PM) 21 model. We previously suggested an alternative approach in which the JS model is modified to 22

Different heat-moisture levels were applied to native starches from different cultivars of sweet potatoes available in Sri Lanka (Wariyapola red, Wariyapola white, Pallepola variety, Malaysian variety and CARI 273) to study the digestibility level. Samples were treated with 20, 25, and 30% moisture at 85°C and 120°C for 6 h and in vitro starch digestibility was tested with porcine pancreatin en...

This study explored the relative roles of climate and phylogenetic background in driving morphometric trait variation in 10 spruce taxa in China. The study further addressed the hypothesis that these variations are consistent with species turnover on climatic gradients. Nine morphometric traits of leaves, seed cones, and seeds for the 10 studied spruce taxa were measured at 504 sites. These dat...