The sustainable development of efficient water-saving agricultural irrigation in Loess Plateau requires reasonable and quantitative planning, design, management, and strategies based on crop-water-salt response relationship. In the present paper, data were measured by using the soil-water-salt sensor CS655 to modify the simulation of root uptake in the original Soil Water Atmosphere Plant (SWAP...

Normalization means to adjust microarray data for effects which arise from variation in the technology rather than from biological differences between the RNA samples or between the printed probes. This paper describes normalization methods based on the fact that dye balance typically varies with spot intensity and with spatial position on the array. Print-tip loess normalization provides a wel...

Growth of herbaceous plants responds sensitively and rapidly to climate variability. Yet, little is known regarding how climate warming influences the growth of herbaceous plants, particularly in semi-arid sites. This contrasts with widely reported tree growth decline and even mortality in response to severe water deficits due to climate warming around the world. Here, we use the relatively nov...

The Chinese Loess Plateau is located in the north of China and has a significant impact on the climate and ecosystem evolvement over the East Asian continent. Estimates of evapotranspiration (ET) at a regional scale are in crucial need for climate studies, weather forecasts, hydrological surveys, ecological monitoring and water resource management. In this research, the ET of the Chinese Loess ...

Different proxies have been used to investigate Quaternary paleoclimate change. Here, we used weathering of calcium nodules in paleosols on China's Loess Plateau as a proxy for Quaternary paleoclimate changes to provide an alternative indicator of these changes. Paleosol and carbonate nodules were collected from Luochuan and Lantian counties in Shaanxi Province, China. We found that this approa...

Loess-palaeosol sequences are valuable archives of past environmental changes. Although regional palaeoclimatic trends and conditions in Southeastern Europe have been inferred from loess sequences, large scale forcing mechanisms responsible for their formation have yet to be determined. Southeastern Europe is a climatically sensitive region, existing under the strong influence of both Mediterra...

Caragana korshinskii is commonly employed to improve drought ecosystems on the Loess Plateau, although the molecular mechanism at work is poorly understood, particularly in terms of the plant's ability to tolerate drought stress. Water is the most severe limiting factor for plant growth on the Loess Plateau. The trichome is known to play an efficient role in reducing water loss through decreasi...

Generalized additive models (GAMs) with bivariate smoothing functions have been applied to estimate spatial variation in risk for many types of cancers. Only a handful of studies have evaluated the performance of smoothing functions applied in GAMs with regard to different geographical areas of elevated risk and different risk levels. This study evaluates the ability of different smoothing func...

A large-scale re-vegetation supported by the Grain for Green Project (GGP) has greatly changed local eco-hydrological systems, with an impact on soil moisture conditions for the Chinese Loess Plateau. It is important to know how, exactly, re-vegetation influences soil moisture conditions, which not only crucially constrain growth and distribution of vegetation, and hence, further re-vegetation,...