Forests in the Southeastern United States are predicted to experience future changes in seasonal patterns of precipitation inputs as well as more variable precipitation events. These climate change‐induced alterations could increase drought and lower soil water availability. Drought could alter rooting patterns and increase the importance of deep roots that access subsurface water resources. To address plant response to drought in both deep rooting and soil water utilization as well as soil drainage, we utilize a throughfall reduction experiment in a loblolly pine plantation of the Southeastern United States to calibrate and validate a hydrological model. The model was accurately calibrated against field measured soil moisture data under ambient rainfall and validated using 30% throughfall reduction data. Using this model, we then tested these scenarios: (a) evenly reduced precipitation; (b) less precipitation in summer, more in winter; (c) same total amount of precipitation with less frequent but heavier storms; and (d) shallower rooting depth under the above 3 scenarios. When less precipitation was received, drainage decreased proportionally much faster than evapotranspiration implying plants will acquire water first to the detriment of drainage. When precipitation was reduced by more than 30%, plants relied on stored soil water to satisfy evapotranspiration suggesting 30% may be a threshold that if sustained over the long term would deplete plant available soil water. Under the third scenario, evapotranspiration and drainage decreased, whereas surface run‐off increased. Changes in root biomass measured before and 4 years after the throughfall reduction experiment were not detected among treatments. Model simulations, however, indicated gains in evapotranspiration with deeper roots under evenly reduced precipitation and seasonal precipitation redistribution scenarios but not when precipitation frequency was adjusted. Deep soil and deep rooting can provide an important buffer capacity when precipitation alone cannot satisfy the evapotranspirational demand of forests. How this buffering capacity will persist in the face of changing precipitation inputs, however, will depend less on seasonal redistribution than on the magnitude of reductions and changes in rainfall frequency. 相似文献
In many arid ecosystems, vegetation frequently occurs in high-cover patches interspersed in a matrix of low plant cover. However, theoretical explanations for shrub patch pattern dynamics along climate gradients remain unclear on a large scale. This context aimed to assess the variance of the Reaumuria soongorica patch structure along the precipitation gradient and the factors that affect patch structure formation in the middle and lower Heihe River Basin (HRB). Field investigations on vegetation patterns and heterogeneity in soil properties were conducted during 2014 and 2015. The results showed that patch height, size and plant-to-patch distance were smaller in high precipitation habitats than in low precipitation sites. Climate, soil and vegetation explained 82.5% of the variance in patch structure. Spatially, R. soongorica shifted from a clumped to a random pattern on the landscape towards the MAP gradient, and heterogeneity in the surface soil properties (the ratio of biological soil crust (BSC) to bare gravels (BG)) determined the R. soongorica population distribution pattern in the middle and lower HRB. A conceptual model, which integrated water availability and plant facilitation and competition effects, was revealed that R. soongorica changed from a flexible water use strategy in high precipitation regions to a consistent water use strategy in low precipitation areas. Our study provides a comprehensive quantification of the variance in shrub patch structure along a precipitation gradient and may improve our understanding of vegetation pattern dynamics in the Gobi Desert under future climate change.
New Earth observation missions and technologies are delivering large amounts of data. Processing this data requires developing and evaluating novel dimensionality reduction approaches to identify the most informative features for classification and regression tasks. Here we present an exhaustive evaluation of Guided Regularized Random Forest (GRRF), a feature selection method based on Random Forest. GRRF does not require fixing a priori the number of features to be selected or setting a threshold of the feature importance. Moreover, the use of regularization ensures that features selected by GRRF are non-redundant and representative. Our experiments based on various kinds of remote sensing images, show that GRRF selected features provides similar results to those obtained when using all the available features. However, the comparison between GRRF and standard random forest features shows substantial differences: in classification, the mean overall accuracy increases by almost 6% and, in regression, the decrease in RMSE almost reaches 2%. These results demonstrate the potential of GRRF for remote sensing image classification and regression. Especially in the context of increasingly large geodatabases that challenge the application of traditional methods. 相似文献
The precipitation patterns in flood season over China associated with the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) are investigated, especially in the eastern China, using the rather long period rainfall data in this century. The results show that there were remarkable differences between the precipitation patterns in flood seasons of ENSO warm phase (El Niño year) and cold phase (La Niña year), as well as between the patterns in El Niño years and their following years. The most parts of China received below normal rainfall in flood season of the onset years of El Niño events, but the coastal area of Southeast China received above normal amounts. Comparatively, the most parts of China received above normal rainfall in flood season of the following years of El Niño events, but the eastern part of the reaches among the Huanghe (Yellow) River, the Huaihe River and the Haihe River, and the Northeast China received less. During ENSO cold phase, the reaches of the Changjiang (Yangtze) River and the North China received more amounts than normal rainfall in flood season of the onset years of La Niña events, and the other regions of China received less. In the following years of La Niña events, the coastal area of the Southeast China, the most part of the Northeast China and the regions between the Huanghe River and the Huaihe River received more precipitation during flood seasons, but the other parts received below normal precipitation. 相似文献
We present a quantitative estimate of the relativistic corrections to the thermal SZ power spectrum produced by the energetic electrons in massive clusters. The corrections are well within 10% for current experiments with working frequencies below v < 100 GHz, but become non-negligible at high frequencies v > 350 GHz. Moreover, the corrections appear to be slightly smaller at higher l or smaller angular scales. We conclude that there is no need to include the relativistic corrections in the theoretical study of the SZ power spectrum especially at low frequencies unless the SZ power spectrum is used for precision cosmology. 相似文献
A full-sky template map of the Galactic free–free foreground emission component is increasingly important for high-sensitivity cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We use the recently published Hα data of both the northern and southern skies as the basis for such a template. The first step is to correct the Hα maps for dust absorption using the 100-μm dust maps of Schlegel, Finkbeiner & Davis. We show that for a range of longitudes, the Galactic latitude distribution of absorption suggests that it is 33 per cent of the full extragalactic absorption. A reliable absorption-corrected Hα map can be produced for ∼95 per cent of the sky; the area for which a template cannot be recovered is the Galactic plane area | b | < 5°, l = 260°–0°–160° and some isolated dense dust clouds at intermediate latitudes. The second step is to convert the dust-corrected Hα data into a predicted radio surface brightness. The free–free emission formula is revised to give an accurate expression (1 per cent) for the radio emission covering the frequency range 100 MHz–100 GHz and the electron temperature range 3000–20 000 K. The main uncertainty when applying this expression is the variation of electron temperature across the sky. The emission formula is verified in several extended H ii regions using data in the range 408–2326 MHz. A full-sky free–free template map is presented at 30 GHz; the scaling to other frequencies is given. The Haslam et al. all-sky 408-MHz map of the sky can be corrected for this free–free component, which amounts to a ≈6 per cent correction at intermediate and high latitudes, to provide a pure synchrotron all-sky template. The implications for CMB experiments are discussed. 相似文献