2 Abstract Vegetation type and cover play an important role in the operation of geomorphological processes by controlling runoff and sediment dynamics. In drylands, land degradation is particularly sensitive to these eco-geomorphic interactions. Whilst many geomorphological studies of land degradation focus on the change in hydrological response as a function of vegetation cover, few have inves...

abstract saturated water content is one of the important parameters which its measurement is necessary in estimation of soil water retention and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity curves. in several researches, saturated water content is assumed to be equal to soil total porosity. in some others, its value is estimated by pedotransfer functions using readily available parameters, such as bulk d...

Imparting knowledge of the physical processes of a system to a model and determining a set of parameter values for a hydrologic or water quality model application (i.e., parameterization) are important and difficult tasks. An exponential increase in the literature has been devoted to the use and development of these models over the years. Few articles, however, have been devoted to developing g...

A critical step in the quantification of soil quality (SQ) is the selection of SQ benchmarks. The benchmarks used in this study were SQ ratings made by 32 farmer collaborators representing a range of farming systems, scales of operation and geographic locations in the Mid-Atlantic region of USA. Soils from 45 pairs of sites identified by their farmers as having good and poor SQ were sampled ove...

Surface soil moisture is a key variable used to describe water and energy exchanges at the land surface/atmosphere interface. Passive microwave remotely sensed data have great potential for providing estimates of soil moisture with good temporal repetition on a daily basis and on a regional scale (f 10 km). However, the effects of vegetation cover, soil temperature, snow cover, topography, and ...

Transpiration, a process by which plants extract water from soil and transmit it to the atmosphere, is a vital (yet least quantified) component of the hydrological cycle. We propose a root-scale model of water uptake, which is based on first principles, i.e. employs the generally accepted Richards equation to describe water flow in partially saturated porous media (both in a root and the ambien...

Soil moisture (SMC) is a key state variable that influences both global water and energy budgets by controlling the redistribution of rainfall into infiltration, runoff, percolation in soil, and evapotranspiration. Due to these characteristics and to the great effect on the surface energy exchange, soil moisture content may have a strong impact on climate change dynamics and it is, therefore, a...