Publications by Sara Bonetti | EPFL Graph Search

Uncertainties as a Guide for Global Water Model Advancement

Global water models allow us to explore the terrestrial water cycle in earth-sized digital laboratories to support science and guide policy. However, these models are still subject to considerable but also reducible uncertainties that can be attributed to ...

2025

Controls of Ecohydrological Grassland Dynamics in Agrivoltaic Systems

Sara Bonetti

Agrivoltaic systems are characterized by the co-existence of photovoltaic panels on agricultural land, allowing simultaneous solar energy and food production without need for further land. Agrivoltaic installations alter the local microclimatic conditions ...

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION2025

The angiogenic growth of cities

Gabriele Manoli, Sara Bonetti

Describing the space-time evolution of urban population is a fundamental challenge in the science of cities, yet a complete theoretical treatment of the underlying dynamics is still missing. Here, we first reconstruct the evolution of London (UK) over 180 ...

Royal Soc2024

Toward a metabolic theory of catchments: Scaling of water and carbon fluxes with size

Andrea Rinaldo, Sara Bonetti, Francesca Bassani

Allometric scaling relations are widely used to link biological processes to body size in nature. Several studies have shown that such scaling laws hold also for natural ecosystems, including individual trees and forests, riverine metabolism, and river net ...

National Academy of Sciences2024

Hydro-pedotransfer functions: A roadmap for future development

Sara Bonetti

Hydro-pedotransfer functions (PTFs) relate easy-to-measure and readily available soil information to soil hydraulic properties (SHPs) for applications in a wide range of process-based and empirical models, thereby enabling the assessment of soil hydraulic ...

2024

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

Water use efficiency: A review of spatial and temporal variability

Gabriele Manoli, Sara Bonetti

Water Use Efficiency (WUE) expresses the trade-off between carbon assimilation (or subsequent carbon storage) and water release, two concurrent gas fluxes essential for plant functioning. Here, we review metrics that have been introduced to quantify WUE ac ...

Elsevier2023

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

Inception of Regular Valley Spacing in Fluvial Landscapes: A Linear Stability Analysis

Sara Bonetti, Shashank Kumar Anand

Incipient valley formation in mountainous landscapes is often associated with their presence at a regular spacing under diverse hydroclimatic forcings. Here we provide a formal linear stability theory for a landscape evolution model (LEM) representing the ...

2022

Comment on “Groundwater Affects the Geomorphic and Hydrologic Properties of Coevolved Landscapes” by Litwin et al

Sara Bonetti, Shashank Kumar Anand

The objective of this comment is to correct two sets of statements in Litwin et al. (2022, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JF006239), which consider our research work (Bonetti et al., 2018, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2017.0693; Bonetti et al., 2020, https:// ...

2022