Understanding the spatial and temporal variations of soil moisture is crucial for the land surface processes and their management. Accurate estimation of spatial and temporal variations of soil moisture is important for various hydrological studies also. Recently, remote sensing techniques have been used to estimate soil moisture. Estimation of soil moisture by remote sensing techniques provide...

A refined hybrid polarimetric decomposition and inversion method for soil moisture estimation under vegetation is investigated for its potential to retrieve soil moisture from vegetated soils in TERENO observatories. The refined algorithm is applied on Lband fully polarimetric data acquired by DLR’s novel F-SAR sensor. Two flight and field measurement campaigns were conducted in 2011 and 2012 f...

In applied studies, the investigation of the relationship between a plant species and environmental variables is essential to manage ecological problems and rangeland ecosystems. This research was conducted in summer 2016. The aim of this study was to compare the predictive power of a number of Species Distribution Models (SDMs) and to evaluate the importance of a range of environmental variabl...

Incoming solar radiation (insolation) is fundamental to most physical and biophysical processes because of its role in energy and water balance. We calculated insolation maps from digital elevation models, using an insolation model that accounts for atmospheric conditions, elevation, surface orientation, and influences of surrounding topography. Herein, we focus on the application of this insol...

In a combined experimental and model study, we investigated effects of surface topography (relief) on the thermal L-band emission of a sandy soil. To this end, brightness temperatures of two adjacent footprint areas were measured quasi-simultaneously with an L-band radiometer at the observation angle of 55° relative to nadir for one year. One footprint featured a distinct relief in the form of ...

Basically, water erosion is one of the most significant environmental problems in the world. The major variables affecting soil erosion are climate, soil, vegetation, and topography. Of these, vegetation and, to some extent, soil and topography may be controlled. However, for adequate intervention, reliable and representative model parameters and running conditions are necessary, which requires...

We report results of resistivity sounding of eight locations in the Cerro Chasc on science preserve area. The soil resistivity near the surface was found to be 1000 m at the ve locations in the Pampa La Bola area. The values at the three locations in the Llano de Chajnantor area were much higher, exceeding 3500 m. This di erence probably re ects di erences in water content in the upper soil lay...