Soil moisture is a key variable in dryland ecosystems since it determines the occurrence and duration of vegetation water stress and affects the development of weather patterns including rainfall. However, the lack of ground observations of soil moisture and rainfall dynamics in many drylands has long been a major obstacle in understanding ecohydrological processes in these ecosystems. It is al...

The ability of Fusarium oxysporum Schlect. to cause a rot of the potato tuber has been clearly demonstrated by a number of workers. The influence of temperature on this disease has been reported in a number of papers, but the experimental evidence as a whole is rather meager, usually only extreme temperatures being used. The effect of moisture on the progress of the disease, except under condit...

[1] Groundwater uptake can play a major role in the survival of vegetation in semiarid areas, but this has not yet been included in an earlier developed ecohydrological stochastic framework. In this paper we provide a piecewise linear equation which includes capillary fluxes from shallow groundwater in the loss function of the ecohydrological stochastic model. The results indicate that this mod...

Annelid coenoses in wet soils reveal specific characteristics in relation to the prevailing complex of abiotic and biotic factors effective in these soils. Especially, the presence or lack of oxygen in the topsoil is of great influence for species composition and vertical distribution of annelids in wet soils. Some annelids, for example most of the smaller enchytraeids, avoid the anaerobic cond...

A project established at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand is aimed at developing a prototype of a real-time landslide forecasting system. The objective is to predict temporal changes in landslide probability for shallow, rainfalltriggered landslides, based on quantitative weather forecasts from numerical weather prediction models. Global weather for...

Surfactant miscible-displacement experiments represent a conventional means of estimating air-water interfacial area (A(I)) in unsaturated porous media. However, changes in surface tension during the experiment can potentially induce unsaturated flow, thereby altering interfacial areas and violating several fundamental method assumptions, including that of steady-state flow. In this work, the m...

Monthly visits to 2 field sites in southern Mississippi were made to determine the influence of monitor examination on feeding site affinity by southeastern native subterranean termites (Reticulitermes spp.). Wooden board monitors were examined once every 30, 60, or 90 days. Presence of live termites and damage to the boards (both binary parameters) were collected for each plot examined over a ...

The effect of relative humidity (43%, 75%, 86% and > 98%) on Aedes aegypti eggs treated with Metarhizium anisopliae or water only was tested for up to a six months exposure at 25 degrees C. Survival of larvae inside eggs was clearly affected by the lowest humidity (43%) tested, and eclosion diminished at all humidities after increasing periods of exposure. M. anisopliae showed to have a strong ...

Successful implementation of best management practices for reducing non-point source (NPS) pollution requires knowledge of the location of saturated areas that produce runoff. A physically-based, fully-distributed, GISintegrated model, the Soil Moisture Distribution and Routing (SMDR) model was developed to simulate the hydrologic behavior of small rural upland watersheds with shallow soils and...