Coupled Behaviour of Soil and Plant Water Dynamics: Effects of Vegetation Cover, Soil Type and Fire Disturbance
type: CreativeWork
description: Plant and soil water dynamics are crucial for terrestrial carbon uptake, agriculture and human livelihoods. As plants primarily rely on water uptake from the soil, soil and plant water dynamics are strongly coupled over most of the land surface. Soil and plant water dynamics also play a crucial role in linking water, energy and carbon cycles, as they are underlying plant transpiration, latent heat transport between land surface and atmosphere as well as plant photosynthesis. The future trajectories of soil and plant water dynamics will also shape the availability of water across the land surface. However characterising soil and plant water dynamics is challenging because the mechanisms controlling them are inter-related. Currently a lot of the knowledge of soil and plant water dynamics is built on field-scale and experimental work, which limits the understanding regarding the mechanisms controlling kilometre-scale soil and plant water dynamics. In this thesis, I use microwave remote sensing observations of soil and plant water dynamics at a kilometre scale to investigate the relationship between them and several other land surface processes and variables. I ask the following primary research question: how do vegetation cover, soil type and fire disturbance interact with and affect soil and plant water dynamics? Each factor in this question will be assessed in an individual chapter. First, I assess vegetation cover using a long-term soil moisture dataset, a vegetation index and temperature data. I investigate periods of decreasing soil moisture, finding a strong control of both vegetation cover and temperature on soil moisture losses. Increases in vegetation lead to slower soil moisture loss, across most of the land surface. This effect persists independent of temperature conditions. Only in cold boreal areas increases in vegetation lead to faster soil moisture loss, but this is limited to high soil moisture conditions. A simple water and energy balance model can rep…
abstract: Plant and soil water dynamics are crucial for terrestrial carbon uptake, agriculture and human livelihoods. As plants primarily rely on water uptake from the soil, soil and plant water dynamics are strongly coupled over most of the land surface. Soil and plant water dynamics also play a crucial role in linking water, energy and carbon cycles, as they are underlying plant transpiration, latent heat transport between land surface and atmosphere as well as plant photosynthesis. The future trajectories of soil and plant water dynamics will also shape the availability of water across the land surface. However characterising soil and plant water dynamics is challenging because the mechanisms controlling them are inter-related. Currently a lot of the knowledge of soil and plant water dynamics is built on field-scale and experimental work, which limits the understanding regarding the mechanisms controlling kilometre-scale soil and plant water dynamics. In this thesis, I use microwave remote sensing observations of soil and plant water dynamics at a kilometre scale to investigate the relationship between them and several other land surface processes and variables. I ask the following primary research question: how do vegetation cover, soil type and fire disturbance interact with and affect soil and plant water dynamics? Each factor in this question will be assessed in an individual chapter. First, I assess vegetation cover using a long-term soil moisture dataset, a vegetation index and temperature data. I investigate periods of decreasing soil moisture, finding a strong control of both vegetation cover and temperature on soil moisture losses. Increases in vegetation lead to slower soil moisture loss, across most of the land surface. This effect persists independent of temperature conditions. Only in cold boreal areas increases in vegetation lead to faster soil moisture loss, but this is limited to high soil moisture conditions. A simple water and energy balance model can rep…
author: Baur, Martin
language: eng
keywords: Remote Sensing, Hydrology, Soil Moisture
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/b14fb98e-2c20-4ae0-9dd8-82dc5c63d3bf/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2024-12-23
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:33:28Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.118420