Using a fully coupled climate–terrestrial ecosystem model, we demonstrate explicitly that an initial perturbation on vegetation induces not only a direct positive vegetation feedback, but also a significant indirect vegetation–soil moisture feedback. The indirect feedback is generated through either fractional cover change or soil moisture depletion. Both indirect feedback mechanisms are trigge...

PALAVRAS-CHAVE Glycine max L. Merrill Temperatura foliar Déficit hídrico Perda de água. ABSTRACT: There are few studies in the specific literature on the use of cover materials to control evaporation in drought-stressed plants grown in pots under greenhouse conditions. The use of these materials is of great importance to ensure that water loss occurs only through transpiration. Thus this study ...

There is no single agreed definition of the term drylands. Two of the most widely accepted definitions are those of FAO and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD, 2000). FAO has defined drylands as those areas with a length of growing period (LGP) of 1–179 days (FAO, 2000a); this includes regions classified climatically as arid (Plate 1), semi-arid and dry subhumid. The...

In hydrological models, evaporation from interception is often disregarded, combined with transpiration, or taken as a fixed percentage of rainfall. In general interception is not considered to be a significant process in rainfallrunoff modelling. However, it appears that on average interception can amount to 20–50% of the precipitation. Therefore, knowledge about the process of interception is...

Although short-rotation woody crop biomass production technology has demonstrated a promising potential to supply feedstocks for bioenergy production, the water and nutrient processes in the woody crop planation ecosystem are poorly understood. In this study, a computer model was developed to estimate the dynamics of water and nitrogen (N) species (e.g., NH-N, NO-N, particulate organic N, and s...

A recursive claim that there is a ’scarcity of global data on evaporative partitioning’ is used to justify the development of the STEAM model (see e.g. pg. 206, L23). However, over the last decade, there have been numerous efforts to derive the separate components of the terrestrial evaporative flux at the global scale, not just from land surface models and climate reanalyses, but also by combi...

In both Australia and Swaziland large areas of sugarcane rely on irrigation to produce a viable crop or to improve rainfed productivity. Matching water supply to crop demand is essential for productivity and sustainability in any irrigation scheme. Historically Class-A pan evaporation was used as a basis for determining sugarcane water demand or evapotranspiration (ETc). ETc is now frequently o...

Abstract Changing pathways of soil moisture loss, either directly from (evaporation) or indirectly through vegetation (transpiration), are an indicator ecosystem and land hydrological cycle responses to the changing climate. Based on ratio transpiration evaporation, this paper investigates loss pathway changes across China using five reanalysis-type datasets for past Coupled Model Intercomparis...