Fluxes of water and energy in physically heterogeneous environments

This is the final report of a one-year, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Fluxes of water and energy at the near-surface environment are tightly interrelated with a heterogeneous vegetation pattern that is a mosaic of tree canopies and intercanopy area. The objective was to improve the ability to predict these interrelationships, which are not well quantified. The authors (1) quantified how vegetation overstory determines the patterns of soil moisture and near-ground solar radiation, (2) developed spatial neighborhood analyses that demonstrated how woody plants exploit canopy/intercanopy heterogeneity, (3) developed a spatially explicit model for predicting near-ground solar radiation for sites along a grassland-forest continuum, (4) developed a water balance model that predicted temporal shifts in soil moisture between canopy and intercanopy patches, and (5) used the collective results to assess large-scale ecosystem responses to climate variations that lead to accelerated soil erosion