In recent years, forest fires frequency and intensity has increased, causing a new awareness about their impact not only on vegetation, but also on hydrological regime. Changes in vegetation influence the processes of interception and evapotranspiration, seriously affecting the hydrological cycle. Forest fires can also affect hydrological processes indirectly, altering the hydraulic properties ...

Prior numerical modelling studies show that atmospheric dispersion is sensitive to surface heterogeneities, but past studies do not consider the impact of a realistic distribution of surface heterogeneities on mesoscale atmospheric dispersion. While these focussed on dispersion in the convective boundary layer, the present work also considers dispersion in the nocturnal boundary layer and above...

Plant communities are coupled with abiotic factors, as species diversity and community composition both respond to and influence climate and soil characteristics. Interactions between vegetation and abiotic factors depend on plant functional types (PFT) as different growth forms will have differential responses to and effects on site characteristics. However, despite the importance of different...

The lower montane zone of northwestern Ecuador, like many parts of the tropics, is undergoing rapid conversion from native forest vegetation to crop and pastureland. The current landscape is a mosaic of agricultural land, forest fragments and secondgrowth vegetation in various stages of development. While there is abundant research documenting the e€ects of land-use change in the lowland tropic...

[1] We present an unmixing method, based on genetic algorithm-soil-vegetationatmosphere-transfer modeling to extract subgrid information of soil and vegetation from remotely sensed soil moisture (downscaled; e.g., soil hydraulic properties, area fractions of soil-vegetation combinations, and unmixed soil moisture time series) that most land surface models use. The unmixing method was evaluated ...

The degradation rate of Mediterranean steppes, especially in North Africa is 1% per year, and this considered a high  rate of degradation. This study conducted in 2014 in the south slope of the Al-Jabal Al-Akhdar, northeast Libya to quantify the vegetation recovery rate and assess selected Vegetation Indices (VIs) for mapping rangelands degradation status using remote sensing technology. Throug...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Soils of mountain regions and their associated plant communities are highly diverse over short spatial scales due to the heterogeneity of geological substrates and highly dynamic geomorphic processes. The consequences of this heterogeneity for biogeochemical transfers, however, remain poorly documented. The objective of this study was to quantify the variability of soil-surf...

[1] Soil moisture is the environmental variable synthesizing the effect of climate, soil, and vegetation on the dynamics of water-limited ecosystems. Unlike abiotic factors (e.g., soil texture and rainfall regime), the control exerted by vegetation composition and structure on soil moisture variability remains poorly understood. A number of field studies in dryland landscapes have found higher ...