Ecosystem respiration (ER) was measured with the eddy covariance technique in 14 forest ecosystems in the Upper Great Lakes Region during the growing seasons of 2002 and 2003. The response of ER to soil temperature and moisture was analyzed using empirical models. On average, ER was higher in the intermediate and young than in the mature stands, and higher in hardwood than in conifer stands. Th...

The water balance equation dictates that streamflow may be reduced by transpiration. Yet temporal disequilibrium weakens the relationship between transpiration and streamflow in many cases where inputs and outputs are unbalanced. We address two critical knowledge barriers in ecohydrology with respect to time, scale dependence and lags. Study objectives were to correlate components of the water ...

Robust models for predicting soil salinity that use visible and near-infrared (vis-NIR) reflectance spectroscopy are needed to better quantify soil salinity in agricultural fields. Currently available models are not sufficiently robust for variable soil moisture contents. Thus, we used external parameter orthogonalization (EPO), which effectively projects spectra onto the subspace orthogonal to...

The contribution of the organic (O) horizon to total soil respiration is poorly understood even though it can represent a large source of uncertainty due to seasonal changes in microclimate and O horizon properties due to plant phenology. Our objectives were to partition the CO(2) effluxes of litter layer and mineral soil from total soil respiration (SR) and determine the relative importance of...

Uncontrolled excess moisture in buildings is a common problem that can lead to changes in fungal communities. In buildings, moisture parameters can be classified by location and include assessments of moisture in the air, at a surface, or within a material. These parameters are not equivalent in dynamic indoor environments, which makes moisture-induced fungal growth in buildings a complex occur...

An analysis of atmospheric energy transport in 22 years (1980–2001) of the 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-40) is presented. In the analyzed budgets, there is a large cancellation between divergences of dry static and latent energy such that the total energy divergence is positive over all tropical oceanic regions except for the east Pacific cold tongue, consistent with previous studies. The west ...

Body size of many animals varies with latitude: body size is either larger at higher latitudes (Bergmann's rule) or smaller at higher latitudes (converse Bergmann's rule). However, the causes underlying these patterns are poorly understood. Also, studies rarely explore how sexual size dimorphism varies with latitude. Here we investigate geographic variation in body size and sexual size dimorphi...

The temperature sensitivity (Q10) of soil heterotrophic respiration (Rh) is an important ecological model parameter and may vary with temperature and moisture. While Q10 generally decreases with increasing temperature, the moisture effects on Q10 have been controversial. To address this, we conducted a 90-day laboratory incubation experiment using a subtropical forest soil with a full factorial...

The special above-ground and underground dual structure in the karst area makes capacity of surface water storage this poor. In water-limited ecosystems, soil moisture is key to survival plants. Influenced by rainfall texture, variation characteristics different vegetation types are slope land. Many researchers use simulation experiments study influence movement processes under patterns, but th...

UNLABELLED BACKGROUND AND AIMS The negative logarithmic relationship between orthodox seed longevity and moisture content in hermetic storage is subject to a low-moisture-content limit (m(c)), but is m(c) affected by temperature? METHODS Red clover (Trifolium pratense) and alfalfa (Medicago sativa) seeds were stored hermetically at 12 moisture contents (2-15 %) and five temperatures (-20, 30,...