Cover board arrays were used to measure the relative abundance of macroinvertebrates and terrestrial salamanders on prescribed burn and control sites in xeric southern Appalachians of northern Georgia and southeastern Tennessee pine-oak forests. Three microsite variables were measured at each cover board: cover board moisture level, temperature under the cover board, and soil moisture. Soil moi...

The objective of this study was to examine the impact of summer throughfall on the growth of trees, at upland and floodplain locations, in the vicinity of Fairbanks, Alaska. Corrugated clear plastic covers were installed under the canopy of floodplain balsam poplar/white spruce stands and upland hardwood/white spruce stands to control soil moisture recharge as a result of summer precipitation. ...

We investigate the response of convection to idealized perturbations in the thermodynamic environment in simulations which parameterize the large-scale circulations using the weak temperature gradient (WTG) approximation. The perturbations include a combination of modifying the environmental moisture and atmospheric stability via imposing anomalies in reference moisture and temperature profiles...

Triggers of summertime convective rainfall depend on numerous interactions and feedbacks, often compounded by spatial variability in soil moisture and its impacts on vegetation function, vegetation composition, terrain, and all the complex turbulent entrainment processes near the capping inversion. To progress even within the most restricted and idealized framework, many of the governing proces...

Soil moisture state and variability control many hydrological and ecological processes as well as exchanges of energy and water between the land surface and the atmosphere. However, its state and variability are poorly understood at spatial scales larger than the fields (i.e. 1 km2) as well as the ability to extrapolate field scale to larger spatial scales. This study investigates soil moisture...

The objective of this paper is to present the contribution of a new dielectric constant characterisation for the modelling of radar backscattering behaviour. Our analysis is based on a large number of radar measurements acquired during different experimental campaigns (Orgeval'94, Pays de Caux'98, 99). We propose a dielectric constant model, based on the combination of contributions from both s...

[1] The nature of the snowpack has the potential to strongly influence the patterns of alpine plant productivity and composition by governing soil moisture levels, growing season duration and the thermal regime of alpine soils. This study evaluates these relationships by modeling the interrelationships of snow depth, snow water equivalent (SWE), snow disappearance rate, soil moisture, attribute...

Leaf water potential, leaf relative water content, and relative transpiration of barley were determined daily under greenhouse conditions at 3 growth stages: tillering to boot, boot to heading, and heading to maturity. The leaf moisture characteristic curve (relative water content versus leaf water potential) was the same for leaves of the same age growing in the same environment for the first ...