Water, isotope and solute fluxes in the soil-plant-atmosphere interface: investigations from the canopy to the root zone

Natalie Orlowski, Matthias Sprenger, Josie Geris, Pilar Llorens, Lixin Wang, and Miriam Coenders-Gerrits

This Special Issue of Geosciences aims to gather high-quality original research articles, reviews, and technical notes on advances in rainfall and evaporation partitioning.

Rainfall that hits the vegetated surface has many options: it can be intercepted by the canopy or flow down as throughfall and/or stemflow. Along its way down, the latter two flows successively hit the understory vegetation and/or forest floor, from where it can again be intercepted or finally infiltrate into the unsaturated zone. This cascade of multiple interception storages makes it difficult to quantify the interception process. First of all, identifying all possible interception storages and quantifying their magnitude is not straightforward, since it changes both in time (vegetation phenology, and seasonality) and space (heterogeneity). However, determining the evaporation from the different interception storages is complex, since each storage has different microclimatic conditions (e.g., radiation, wind, and humidity), which are interdependent as well. Additionally, methods that focus on measuring the evaporation flux have trouble with distinguishing vapour originating from interception and transpiration, since most methods are only capable of measuring the total evaporation. Hence, if we want to understand how vegetation redistributes the rainfall, we should consider the entire processof rainfall and evaporation partitioning.

In this Special Issue, we focus on studies that deal with novel observation or model techniques that aim to increase our understanding of rainfall and evaporation partitioning, both in time and space, and on a small scale as well as a regional–global scale.

Further info can be found here.

Cesar Jimenez Rodriguez made a very cool and interactive visual story on his PhD-work on measuring evaporation with stable water isotopes. Highly recommended to have a look: