Body size is an important feature of an animal that is linked with its life history, morphology, physiology and ecology. Understanding the association between body size and habitat type of an animal and the underlying causes for this are important for determining their distribution. The present study examines the association between body size and habitat types of tiger beetles in Sri Lanka and ...

Very little is known regarding the ecology of Nitrosospira sp. strain AF-like bacteria, a unique group of ammonia oxidizers within the Betaproteobacteria. We studied the response of Nitrosospira sp. strain AF-like ammonia oxidizers to changing environmental conditions by applying molecular methods and physiological measurements to Californian grassland soil manipulated in the laboratory. This s...

In the course of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission calibration and validation activities, a ground based L-band radiometer ELBARA II was situated at the test site Puch in Southern Germany in the Upper Danube Catchment. The experiment is described and the different data sets acquired are presented. The L-band microwave emission of the biosphere (L-MEB) model that is also used in th...

Row structure causes the anisotropy of microwave brightness temperature (TB) of soil surface, and it also can affect soil moisture retrieval accuracy when its influence is ignored in the inversion model. To study the effect of typical row structure on the retrieved soil moisture and evaluate if there is a need to introduce this effect into the inversion model, two ground-based experiments were ...

[1] To make use of satellite microwave observations for estimating soil moisture, a dual‐pass land data assimilation system (DLDAS) is developed in this paper by incorporating a dual‐pass assimilation framework into the Community Land Model version 3 (CLM3). In the DLDAS, the model state (volumetric soil moisture content) and model parameters are jointly optimized using the gridded Advanced Mic...

Soil moisture is a key variable that controls the exchange of water and energy fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere. However, the temporal evolution of soil moisture is neither easy to measure nor monitor at large scales because of its high spatial variability. This is mainly a result of the local variation in soil properties and vegetation cover. Thus, land surface models are nor...

Soil moisture information is of critical importance to real-world applications such as agriculture, water resource management, flood, fire and landslide prediction, mobility, soil hydraulic parameter estimation etc. Many of these applications require soil moisture information at high resolution. While this may be estimated from land surface models, the predictions are often poor due to inadequa...

This paper presents the development and implementation of a spatio-temporal variational data assimilation system (4D-var) for the soil–vegetation–atmosphere transfer model “Community Land Model” (CLM3.5), along with the development of the adjoint code for the core soil–atmosphere transfer scheme of energy and soil moisture. The purpose of this work is to obtain an improved estimation technique ...

Understanding the effects of increasing temperature is central in explaining the effects of climate change on vegetation. Here, we investigate how warming affects vegetation regeneration and root biomass and if there is an interactive effect of warming with other environmental variables. We also examine if geothermal warming effects on vegetation regeneration and root biomass can be used in cli...