A large-scale re-vegetation supported by the Grain for Green Project (GGP) has greatly changed local eco-hydrological systems, with an impact on soil moisture conditions for the Chinese Loess Plateau. It is important to know how, exactly, re-vegetation influences soil moisture conditions, which not only crucially constrain growth and distribution of vegetation, and hence, further re-vegetation,...

Daily transpiration rate was decreased by low soil moisture, phenylmercuric acetate (PMA) in combination with kaolinite, Mobileaf (a filmforming wax emulsion manufactured by the Mobil Oil Co.), PMA alone, and kaolinite alone in this order. At high soil moisture, dry matter was decreased by PMA but was increased by Mobileaf and by PMA + kaolinite combination. At low soil moisture, dry matter was...

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...

In the course of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission calibration and validation activities, a ground based L-band radiometer ELBARA II was situated at the test site Puch in Southern Germany in the Upper Danube Catchment. The experiment is described and the different data sets acquired are presented. The L-band microwave emission of the biosphere (L-MEB) model that is also used in th...

The radar signal recorded by earth observation (EO) satellites is sensitive to soil moisture and surface roughness, which both influence the onset of runoff. This paper focuses on inversion of these parameters using a multi-angular approach based on RADARSAT-1 data with incidence angles of 35 and 47 (in mode S3 and S7). This inversion was performed with three backscatter models: Geometrical Opt...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched on November 2009, is an unprecedented initiative to globally monitor surface soil moisture using a novel 2-D L-band interferometric radiometer concept. Airborne campaigns and ground-based field experiments have proven that radiometers operating at L-band are highly sensitive to soil moisture, due to...

A model system was established to determine whether intergeneric plasmid transfer occurs in soil and how various soil variables affect the rate of plasmid transfer. The donor bacterium, Escherichia coli HB101 carrying plasmid pBLK1-2 (pRK2073::Tn5), and the recipient bacterium, Rhizobium fredii USDA 201, were inoculated into a sterile Adelphia fine-sandy-loam soil. Transconjugants were enumerat...