A book chapter reviewing what is known about rock moisture and how plant roots use water stored in weathered bedrock.
A synthesis of current knowledge about rock moisture, the water stored in weathered bedrock, and how plant roots access it, written for the Routledge Handbook of Terrestrial Ecohydrology.
Using remotely sensed water balances, we show that woody plants across the U.S. routinely access “rock moisture”: water stored in unsaturated, weathered bedrock that hydrologic and ecosystem models typically neglect.
Contrary to the long-standing assumption that plants access water only in soils, we found that woody plants across the continental U.S. commonly use rock moisture: water stored in the cracks and fissures of weathered bedrock. Because direct measurements of bedrock water are rare, we used plants as sensors, inferring bedrock water use from remotely sensed water balances.
See the project page (opens in a new tab) for maps, data, and code.
How vegetation responds to an extreme storm depends more on the characteristics of the site than on the intensity of the storm. We used machine learning to isolate the photosynthesis response to extreme storms at FLUXNET sites around the world.
Vegetation response to drought is studied far more than response to extreme storms, even though their global impacts may be comparable. Using machine learning with data from 54 FLUXNET sites, I quantified changes in photosynthesis after extreme storms and found that the response is explained better by soil texture, climate, topography, and vegetation density than by storm intensity.
Code and data (opens in a new tab) on Zenodo.
A new gridded evapotranspiration dataset for CONUS based on surface flux equilibrium, which needs only net radiation, air temperature, and humidity. We validate it against commonly used datasets using triple collocation.
Nearly all evapotranspiration (ET) datasets build in assumptions about soil moisture and plant behavior, which makes them hard to use for learning about the subsurface. I implemented a remotely sensed ET dataset based on the surface flux equilibrium approach, which needs only net radiation, air temperature, and humidity, and showed with triple collocation that it performs comparably to commonly used ET products.
The daily ET dataset (opens in a new tab) is on Zenodo.