Identifying the determinants of habitat quality for a species is essential for understanding how populations are limited and regulated. Spatiotemporal variation in moisture and its influence on food availability may drive patterns of habitat occupancy and demographic outcomes. Nonbreeding migratory birds in the neotropics occupy a range of habitat types that vary with respect to moisture. Using...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the possible changes in tidal volume, minute volume and respiratory rate caused by the use of a heat and moisture exchanger in patients receiving pressure support mechanical ventilation and to quantify the variation in pressure support required to compensate for the effect caused by the heat and moisture exchanger. METHODS Patients under invasive mechanical ventilation i...

Drought is one of the most important but least understood issues in global environmental changes. Decrease in soil moisture is an indicator of drought. Here, we analyze summer (June–August) soil moisture measurement data across 50 sites in China in order to investigate the linkage between climate change and drought. At the country scale, a significant decrease in summer soil moisture in the top...

Soil moisture plays a key role in vegetation restoration and ecosystem stability in arid and semiarid regions. The response of soil moisture to rainfall pulses is an important hydrological process, which is strongly influenced by land use during the implementation of vegetation restoration. In this study, vertical soil moisture variations of woodland (Pinus tabulaeformis), native grassland (Sti...

SbvErai, investigators have shown that considerable variation exists in the activity of digitalis leaves. (1) Even those of the Official variety grown in the same locality have been found to differ in glucosidal content. The two chief factors which modify the activity of the leaves are: (2) heat and (3) moisture. Heat increases the activity by increasing the amount of glucosides formed, while m...

California’s medium-grain rice industry experiences a wide range of head rice yield (HRY). Average moisture of a representative paddy rice sample is the commercially used predictor of optimum harvest date to achieve high HRY. A two-year field study demonstrated that average rice moisture alone is not an adequate predictor of HRY. The history of rice moisture caused by varying meteorological con...

The South Asian Monsoon and mid-latitude Westerlies are two important controls on Tibetan Plateau (TP) fresh water resources. Understanding their interaction requires long-term information on spatial patterns in moisture variability on the TP. Here we develop a network of 23 moisture-sensitive tree-ring chronologies from major juniper forests in a north-south transect on the eastern TP. Over th...

Moisture transfer in mixtures of lowand high-moisture content (MC) rough rice (ranging from 9.5 to 18.0% w.b.) was investigated with a single-kernel moisture tester over a period of30 days. The intergranular air attained constant relative humidity corresponding to the mean MC of the mixture within afew minutes ofmixing. About 90% ofthe change in the MC of lowand high-MC kernels occurred within ...

Moisture buffering by the room enclosure can have an important influence on the variation in interior relative humidity. A characterisation to qualify and quantify this moisture buffering effect is given in a complementary paper (Janssen and Roels, 2009a, 2009b). Starting from this methodology, this paper proposes a method to determine the hygric inertia of an entire room in situ. To do so, a h...