Studying the forest subsurface is a challenge because of its heterogeneous nature and difficult access.Traditional approaches used by ecologists to characterize the subsurface have a low spatial representativity. This review article illustrates how geophysical techniques can and have been used to get new insights into forest ecology. Near-surface g...
Published in Environmental Research Letters
Tree rings can reveal long-term environmental dynamics and drivers of tree growth. However, individual ecological drivers of tree growth need to be disentangled from the effects of other co-occurring environmental and climatic conditions in tree rings to examine the histories of stand- to landscape-level ecological processes. Here, we integrate eco...
Published in Frontiers in Microbiology
Biocrusts are ecosystem engineers in drylands and structure the landscape through their ecohydrological effects. They regulate soil infiltration and evaporation but also surface water redistribution, providing important resources for vascular vegetation. Spatially-explicit ecohydrological models are useful tools to explore such ecohydrological mech...
Landscapes receive water from precipitation and then transport, store, mix, and release it, both downward to streams and upward to vegetation. How they do this shapes floods, droughts, biogeochemical cycles, contaminant transport, and the health of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Because many of the key processes occur invisibly in the subsurfa...
Published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
Understanding of the Everglades’ ecological vulnerabilities and restoration needs has advanced over the past decade but has not been applied in an integrated manner. To address this need, we developed the Everglades Vulnerability Analysis (EVA), a decision support tool that uses modular Bayesian networks to predict the ecological outcomes of a subs...
Published in Environmental Research: Ecology
In dryland ecosystems, vegetation within different plant functional groups exhibits distinct seasonal phenologies that are affected by the prevailing hydroclimatic forcing. The seasonal variability of precipitation, atmospheric evaporative demand, and streamflow influences root-zone water availability to plants in water-limited environments. Increa...
Riparian woodlands are hotspots of productivity and biodiversity on dryland landscapes, yet riparian tree species are also extremely vulnerable to catastrophic hydraulic damage caused by hydroclimatic change. Root zone water subsidies from shallow groundwater facilitate the high levels of productivity seen in riparian woodlands. Shallow groundwater...
The interaction between topography and climate has a crucial role in shaping forest composition and structure. The understating of how the ecohydrological processes across the landscape affect tree performance becomes especially important with the expected reduction in water availability and increase in water demand, which could enhance the thermal...
Published in Civil and Environmental Engineering Reports
The paper presents the results of numerical analyses carried out in the IRIC environment on the Nays2DH hydrodynamic model regarding the impact of plants in the riverbed and watercourse maintenance on hydraulic conditions. The research material was collected for the actual input variant in October 2018 on the Ślęza River in Wrocław. The constructed...
Published in The New phytologist
Savannas cover a significant fraction of the Earth's land surface. In these ecosystems, C3 trees and C4 grasses coexist persistently, but the mechanisms explaining coexistence remain subject to debate. Different quantitative models have been proposed to explain coexistence, but these models make widely contrasting assumptions about which mechanisms...
