on photosynthetic competence or light-interception. It is concluded that O 3 depletion and the concurrent rise This critical review of recent literature questions earlin UV-B irradiance is not a direct threat to photosynier predictions that photosynthetic productivity of thetic productivity of crops and natural vegetation. higher plants is vulnerable to increased ultraviolet-B (UV-B) radiation ...

Precipitation is the most fundamental input of water for terrestrial ecosystems. Most precipitation inputs are vertical, via rain, but can be horizontal, via wind-driven rain and snow, or, in some ecosystems such as tropical montane cloud forests (TMCFs), via fog interception. Fog interception can be particularly important in ecosystems where fog is frequently present and there are seasonal per...

Estimating canopy interception of water by plants during rainfall or sprinkler irrigation is a critical step for evaluating water-use efficiency. Most existing experimental studies and mathematic models of canopy interception have paid little attention to the interception losses of water by herbaceous plants. To better understand the canopy interception processes of herbaceous plants and to est...

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...

Leaves are the organs that intercept light and create photosynthesis. Efficient light interception is provided by leaves oriented orthogonal to most of the sun rays. Except in the polar regions, this means orthogonal to the direction of acceleration due to gravity, or simply horizontal. The leaves of almost all terrestrial plants grow in a gravity field that tends to bend them downward and ther...

The three-dimensional structure of a coniferous shoot gives rise to multiple scattering of light between the needles of the shoot, causing the shoot spectral reflectance to differ from that of a flat leaf. Forest reflectance models based on the radiative transfer equation handle shoot level clumping by correcting the radiation attenuation coefficient with a clumping index. The clumping index ca...