Publications related to Laboratory of Catchment Hydrology and Geomorphology

Investigation of microbial community dynamics in soil during variable hydrological forcing

Climate change is expected to alter the temporal distribution of precipitation events, leading to prolonged drought periods and an increased frequency of extreme precipitation events. Changes in precipitation pattern will directly affect soil moisture dyna ...

EPFL2024

Linking Soil Structure, Hydraulic Properties, and Organic Carbon Dynamics: A Holistic Framework to Study the Impact of Climate Change and Land Management

Sara Bonetti

Climate change and unsustainable land management practices have resulted in extensive soil degradation, including alteration of soil structure (i.e., aggregate and pore size distributions), loss of soil organic carbon, and reduction of water and nutrient h ...

2023

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

Consider the Anoxic Microsite: Acknowledging and Appreciating Spatiotemporal Redox Heterogeneity in Soils and Sediments

Meret Aeppli, Vincent Noel

Reduction-oxidation (redox) reactions underlie essentially all biogeochemical cycles. Like most soil properties and processes, redox is spatiotemporally heterogeneous. However, unlike other soil features, redox heterogeneity has yet to be incorporated into ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Life cycle environmental assessment of retaining walls in unsaturated soils

Alessio Ferrari, Gianluca Speranza

Retaining structures above groundwater level support soils that are usually in a state of partial saturation and subject to the actions of atmospheric agents. The current design approach considers the possible extremes of soil conditions - either totally d ...

ELSEVIER2022

Stability of tropical forest tree carbon-water relations in a rainfall exclusion treatment through shifts in effective water uptake depth

Charlotte Grossiord

Increasing severity and frequency of drought is predicted for large portions of the terrestrial biosphere, with major impacts already documented in wet tropical forests. Using a 4-year rainfall exclusion experiment in the Daintree Rainforest in northeast A ...

WILEY2021

Advances in the Soil-Structure Interaction Analysis -- from Surface Footings to Thermoactive Deep Foundations

Cristiano Garbellini

Mutual interactions between soil and foundation play a fundamental role in the overall behaviour of constructions. Therefore, it is not surprising that soil-structure interaction has been the subject of numerous research works. This doctoral thesis is a th ...

EPFL2021

Riparian wetland properties counter the effect of land-use change on soil carbon stocks after rainforest conversion to plantations

Thomas Guillaume

Progressive conversion of tropical rainforests to agricultural monocultures in South East Asia increasingly affects landscape types such as riparian areas. The impacts of conversions on soil organic matter (SOM) vary with changing landforms. However, this ...

2021

Effects of large macropores on soil evaporation in salt marshes

David Andrew Barry

The occurrence of macropores in salt marsh sediments is a natural and ubiquitous phenomenon. Although they are widely assumed to affect pore-water flow in salt marshes significantly, the mechanisms involved and their extent are not well understood. We cond ...

2020

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

Quantification of Synthetic Polyesters from Biodegradable Mulch Films in Soils

Stephanie Christa Remke

Soil biodegradable mulch films composed of the polyester polybutylene adipate-co-terephthalate (PBAT) are being increasingly used in agriculture. Analytical methods to quantify PBAT in field soils are needed to assess its soil occurrence and fate. Here, we ...

2020

A generalised water retention model with soil fabric evolution

Lyesse Laloui, Angelica Tuttolomondo, Yafei Qiao, Xingbang Lu

This paper introduces a novel soil water retention curve model that considers two different mechanisms of water retention –namely capillarity and adsorption – and their evolution with soil fabric along a generalized stress path. The model is formulated bas ...

2021

Alternative Scenarios for the Development of Oil Palm in the Tropics: Carbon and Nutrients Dynamics

Juan Carlos Quezada Rivera

Expansion of agriculture in forested areas poses significant threats and pressure to ecosystems and potentially the global climate. More specifically, expansion of oil palm (OP) plantations has been found to exert great impact on key ecosystem functions li ...

EPFL2020

Geotechnical and environmental performance of retaining structures in unsaturated soils

Gianluca Speranza

Presently, environmental issues are considered as critical aspects concerning the market competitiveness in the building and construction sector. However, the construction sector is regarded as one of the main areas contributing to CO2 emissions and resour ...

EPFL2020

Edge influence on understorey plant communities depends on forest management

Matteo Tolosano

Questions Does the influence of forest edges on plant species richness and composition depend on forest management? Do forest specialists and generalists show contrasting patterns? ...

WILEY2020

Modeling metabolic networks of individual bacterial agents in heterogeneous and dynamic soil habitats (IndiMeSH)

Vassily Hatzimanikatis, Meriç Ataman, Dani Or

Natural soil is characterized as a complex habitat with patchy hydrated islands and spatially variable nutrients that is in a constant state of change due to wetting-drying dynamics. Soil microbial activity is often concentrated in sparsely distributed hot ...

2019

Effect of Dispersive Soil on the Electromagnetic Response of Buried Wires in the UHF Range

In this paper, we analyze the effect of the soil on the induced current in a buried wire excited by an external field in the ultrahigh frequency range. We use an extended version of the Messier model, which provides the electromagnetic (EM) properties of d ...

2018

Current developments in soil ecotoxicology and the need for strengthening soil ecotoxicology in Europe: results of a stakeholder workshop

BackgroundSoil is one of our most important resources and fulfills many ecological functions such as storage and filtration of water and nutrients, transformation of chemical compounds and nutrients, biomass production, and carbon storage. Such soil functi ...

2018

Coupling X-ray computed tomography and freeze-coring for the analysis of fine-grained low-cohesive soils

Claire Guenat, Pascal Turberg, Adrien Francis Olivier Liernur, Andreas Cedric Schomburg, Renée-Claire Le Bayon

This paper presents the coupling of freeze-core sampling with X-ray CT scanning for the analysis of the soil structure of fine-grained, low-cohesive soils. We used a medical scanner to image the 3D soil structure of the frozen soil cores, providing X-ray C ...

Elsevier Science Bv2017