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 ...
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 ...
Rapid mass movements (RMM) pose a substantial risk to people and infrastructure. Reliable and cost-efficient measures have to be taken to reduce this risk. One of these measures includes establishing and advancing the State of Practice in the application o ...
The velocity of a liquid slug falling in a capillary tube is lower than predicted for Poiseuille flow due to presence of menisci, whose shapes are determined by the complex interplay of capillary, viscous, and gravitational forces. Due to the presence of m ...
Evaporation from porous media involves mass and energy transport including phase change, vapor diffusion, and liquid flow, resulting in complex displacement patterns affecting drying rates. Force balance considering media properties yields characteristic l ...
Interplay between capillary, gravity and viscous forces in unsaturated porous media gives rise to a range of complex flow phenomena affecting morphology, stability and dynamics of wetting and drainage fronts. Similar average phase contents may result in si ...
Evaporative drying of porous media is jointly controlled by external ( atmospheric) conditions and by media internal transport properties. Effects of different atmospheric potential evaporative demand on observed drying rates were studied in a series of la ...
Soils are known to support a great bacterial diversity down to the millimeter scale, but the mechanisms by which such a large diversity is sustained are largely unknown. A feature of unsaturated soils is that water usually forms thin, poorly-connected film ...
Water is arguably the most important constituent of microbial microhabitats due to its control of physical and physiological processes critical to microbial activity. In natural environments, bacteria often live on unsaturated surfaces, in thin (micrometri ...
Prediction of water flow and transport processes in soils susceptible to structural alteration such as compaction of tilled agricultural lands or newly constructed landfills rely on accurate description of changes in soil unsaturated hydraulic conductivity ...
The immense diversity of microbial life found in the vadose zone reflects the extremely heterogeneous and highly dynamic aquatic and chemical environments formed within soil pore spaces. The notion of planktonian free swimming microbes is unrealistic under ...
Interplay between capillary, gravity and viscous forces in unsaturated fractures gives rise to a range of complex flow phenomena. Evidence of highly intermittent fluxes, preferential and sustainable flow pathways lead to potentially significant flow focusi ...
Liquid behavior under reduced gravity conditions is of considerable interest for various components of life-support systems required for manned space missions. High costs and limited opportunities for spaceflight experiments hinder advances in reliable des ...
[1] Fluid flow in deformable porous media is of interest in many areas of hydrology, geophysics, and environmental engineering at scales ranging from individual pore to field scale. With increasing interest in pore-scale hydraulics, there is also the need ...
Soil bacterial cells are often found embedded in biosynthesized extracellular polymeric substances ( EPS) forming aggregates or stationary colonies attached to solid surfaces. Soil bacterial aggregation and pooling of resources offer a successful adaptatio ...
Water flow between porous grains varies widely depending on the water distribution in contacts between grains. The hydraulic behavior of contacts varies from highly conductive when water fills the contacts to a bottleneck to flow as water pressure drops an ...
