Publications related to Vegetation

Soil warming alters tree water use and canopy stomatal conductance in a mixed subtropical forest

As air temperature and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) increase continuously, forests are losing more water through evapotranspiration, with large consequences for local and global hydrological cycles. In regions with high vegetation cover, soil warming can b ...

Elsevier2024

Ecosystem engineering by periphyton in Alpine proglacial streams

Tom Ian Battin, Davide Mancini, Marc Aguet, Adrijan Selitaj, Matteo Roncoroni

Stream periphytons are candidate ecosystem engineers in proglacial margins. Here, we quantify the extent to which they are engineers for the case of hillslope-fed tributaries in the terrace zones of proglacial margin alluvial plains. Candidate ecosystem en ...

WILEY2023

Global Mapping of Potential and Climatic Plant‐Available Soil Water

Sara Bonetti, Dani Or

The estimation of plant-available soil water (PASW) is essential to quantify transpiration fluxes, the onset of heatwaves, irrigation water management, land-use decisions, vegetation ecology, and land surface memory in climate models. PASW is the amount of ...

2023

Fish Diversity in Relation to Littoral Habitats in Three Basins of Lake Kivu (East Africa)

Alfred Johny Wüest

In total, 28 of the 29 fish species reported from the Lake Kivu basin occur in the littoral zone of the lake, but information about their structure, occurrence, and the habitats affecting their distribution is largely lacking. The lake's inshore area is po ...

MDPI2023

Colloidal transport and deposition through dense vegetation

David Andrew Barry, Li Chen, Congrong Yu

The effectiveness of submerged synthetic aquatic vegetation on removal of colloids from flowing water was investigated to explore retention of particulate nonpoint source pollutants in aquatic systems. In colloid transport experiments, the deposition rate ...

Elsevier2022

On the benefit of concurrent adjustment of active and passive optical sensors with GNSS & raw inertial data

Jan Skaloud, Davide Antonio Cucci, Kyriaki Mouzakidou

In airborne laser scanning a high-frequency trajectory solution is typically determined from inertial sensors and employed to directly geo-reference the acquired laser points. When low-cost MEMS inertial sensors are used, such as in lightweight unmanned ae ...

2022

On the fractal structure of soil moisture fields

Andrea Rinaldo

We study the spatial structure of soil moisture fields within savanna ecosystems, whose persistence is vital because it is the driver of the entire ecological structure and function. These include changes in the physical and biogeochemical conditions of th ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2021

Human-friendly solutions for last-centimeter drone delivery

Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski

The popularity of delivery drones is constantly increasing due to their ability to deliver packages more rapidly and economically than current transportation methods. Consequently, drones have been employed by logistics companies for delivering payloads to ...

EPFL2020

Shift in plant-soil interactions along a lakeshore hydrological gradient

Alexandre Buttler, Luca Bragazza, Mathieu Raymond Santonja, Wenjuan Feng

Wetlands occupy the transitional zone between aquatic and terrestrial systems. Hydrological conditions have significant influence on wetland plant communities and soil biogeochemistry. However, our knowledge about plant-soil interactions in wetlands along ...

ELSEVIER2020

Spontaneous ecological recovery of vegetation in a red gypsum landfill: Betula pendula dominates after 10 years of inactivity

François Gillet

Red gypsum is the product of the neutralization of titanium dioxide (TiO2) extraction residue from ilmenite and anatase. The disposal of red gypsum creates heterogeneous plots with layers that may include Fe, Ca, Al, Mg, Mn, S, and other elements and an al ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV2019

Responses of permanent grasslands to drought during the plant growing season: combining agronomic, functional and ecophysiological approaches

Amarante Vitra

Extreme summer drought events are predicted to increase in intensity and frequency within the current century. The resulting water scarcity could dramatically impact human activities related to agriculture, due to the strong relationship between precipitat ...

EPFL2019

Nutrient limitations induced by drought affect forage N and P differently in two permanent grasslands

Alexandre Buttler, Pierre Rémi Mariotte, Amarante Vitra, Claire Emilie Deléglise

Drought events can strongly affect ecosystem functioning by modifying relationship between plants, microbes and soil chemistry, with consequent impacts on nutrient cycling. However, the potential impacts of a soil moisture reduction on the nitrogen (N) and ...

ELSEVIER2019

Marteloscopes as training tools for the retention and conservation of habitat trees in forests

Rita Bütler Sauvain

Recently several initiatives on the political and practical level have aimed at promoting forest biodiversity and at halting the loss of species in forest ecosystems. Nevertheless numerous species are still threatened. The main reason for this phenomenon i ...

2019

Shifts in wind energy potential following land-use driven vegetation dynamics in complex terrain

Fernando Porté Agel, Alexandre Buttler, François Golay, Jiannong Fang, Alexander Ludwig Johannes Peringer

Many mountainous regions with high wind energy potential are characterized by multi-scale variabilities of vegetation in both spatial and time dimensions, which strongly affect the spatial distribution of wind resource and its time evolution. To this end, ...

2018