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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
