Search results for " Land"
showing 10 items of 3130 documents
Topographic descriptors and thermal inversions amid the plateaus and mountains of the Jura (France)
2018
Sixteen temperature measurement sites under forest cover are distributed across the plateaus and mountains of the Jura (France). They are composed of pairs of stations located, one at the bottom of a topographic trough, the other at least 50 m higher in altitude. Three descriptors (station elevation, altitudinal difference (amplitude) between the two stations of each site, and topographical context) are used to explain how the frequency, intensity, and duration of inversions are spatially structured. Depending on whether one considers: 1) tn (minimum temperature) or tx (maximum temperature), 2) frequency or intensity, the sign of the correlation values changes. This reflects the fact that n…
Land set-up systems in Italy: A long tradition of soil and water conservation sewed up to a variety of pedo-climatic environments
2020
Land set-up systems in Italy were and, in a few cases, still are integral parts of agricultural landscapes. The soils of Italy mirror a wide variety of climates and morphologies and derive from a great diversity of parent materials influenced by different soil temperature and moisture regimes. Furthermore, their development was influenced by several anthropogenic activities over time including land settings. Land set-up systems have been widely used throughout the Italian soilscape to regulate surface and underground water and to improve the physical soil features in a way that ensures mixed herbaceous and tree-crops cultivation. In recent times, new technologies have been introduced in agr…
From USSR to EU: 20 years of rural landscape changes in Vidzeme, Latvia
2012
Landscape changes have been observed throughout rural Europe over the past decades in relation to intensifying agriculture and land marginalisation. This is particularly true for Central and Eastern Europe as drastic political and socio-economic changes have taken place over the past century, as is the case for Latvia. Using a detailed time series of high-resolution remotely sensed images spanning from 1988 to 2007, the landscape structure (composition and configuration) in Vidzeme, central Latvia, is examined and compared between periods. Major recent events for the country, such as independence and entry into the European Union are covered. The effect on landscape structure of various soc…
Responses of aquatic plants to eutrophication in rivers:a revised conceptual model
2018
Compared to research on eutrophication in lakes, there has been significantly less work carried out on rivers despite the importance of the topic. However, over the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in the response of aquatic plants to eutrophication in rivers. This is an area of applied research and the work has been driven by the widespread nature of the impacts and the significant opportunities for system remediation. A conceptual model has been put forward to describe how aquatic plants respond to eutrophication. Since the model was created, there have been substantial increases in our understanding of a number of the underlying processes. For example, we now know the thre…
Analysis of the radar vegetation index and assessment of potential for improvement
2018
The Radar Vegetation Index (RVI) is widely applied to indicate vegetation cover. The index includes the backscattering intensities of co- and cross-polarization that do not only contain information coming from vegetation scattering at longer wavelength (L-band), but also from the soil underneath. A forward modelling approach using active and passive microwave-derived parameters to obtain the scattering contribution of the soil is pursued. The idea of this research study is a subtraction of the attenuated soil scattering contribution from the measured backscattering intensities, to provide a clean vegetation-based solution, called improved RVI (RVII). For latter analysis, the vegetation volu…
Thermal and structural modeling of the Scillato wedge-top basin source-to-sink system. Insights into the Sicilian fold-and-thrust belt evolution (Ita…
2019
AbstractTemperature-dependent clay mineral assemblages, vitrinite reflectance, and one-dimensional (1-D) thermal and three-dimensional (3-D) geological modeling of a Neogene wedge-top basin in the Sicilian fold-and-thrust belt and its pre-orogenic substratum allowed us to: (1) define the burial history of the sedimentary succession filling the wedge-top basin and its substratum, (2) reconstruct the wedge-top basin geometry, depocenter migration, and sediment provenance through time in the framework of a source-to-sink system, and (3) shed new light into the kinematic evolution of the Apennine-Maghrebian fold-and-thrust belt.The pre-orogenic substratum of the Scillato basin shows an increase…
Rare earth element and neodymium isotope tracing of sedimentary rock weathering
2020
Chemical weathering plays an important role in sequestering atmospheric CO2, but its potential influence on global climate over geological timescales remains debated. To some extent, this uncertainty arises from the difficulty in separating the respective contribution of sedimentary and crystalline silicate rocks to past weathering rates in the geological record; two types of rocks having presumably different impact on the long-term carbon cycle. In this study, we investigate the use of rare earth element (REE) and neodymium isotopes (εNd) in leached iron oxide fractions of river sediments for tracing the origin of weathered rocks on continents. A new index, called ‘concavity index’ (CI), i…
Comparing methods for computation of run-up heights of landslide-generated tsunami in the Northern Sicily continental margin
2018
The North Sicily continental margin is a very active region located in the Central Mediterranean. Strong seismicity, active tectonics and volcanism, fluid escape, high sediment supply, and widespread mass movements historically have exposed this region to marine geohazards, with a potential for tsunami generation. Morpho-bathymetric analysis revealed that one of the most common mechanisms associated with marine geohazards is due to submarine mass failure processes, genetically linked to the other processes active in this margin. With the aim to assess the risks associated with landslide-generated anomalous waves, we selected two sectors of this margin, Gulf of Palermo to the west and Patti …
Global-Scale Evaluation of Roughness Effects on C-Band AMSR-E Observations
2015
Quantifying roughness effects on ground surface emissivity is an important step in obtaining high-quality soil moisture products from large-scale passive microwave sensors. In this study, we used a semi-empirical method to evaluate roughness effects (parameterized here by the parameter) on a global scale from AMSR-E (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS) observations. AMSR-E brightness temperatures at 6.9 GHz obtained from January 2009 to September 2011, together with estimations of soil moisture from the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) L3 products and of soil temperature from ECMWF’s (European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasting) were used as inputs in a retrieval…
A global palaeoclimatic reconstruction for the Valanginian based on clay mineralogical and geochemical data
2020
International audience; High-resolution clay mineral and δ18Ocarb analyses have been performed on three sections of Valanginian age (Early Cretaceous), from northwestern (~20–30°N) and southern (~53°S) Tethyan realms. The data have been integrated in a large set of published mineralogical (clays), and geochemical (δ18Ocarb, δ18Obivalve, δ18Olenticulina, δ18Obelemnite, and TEX86) data from 17 sections, situated between ~45°N and ~53°S. Based on this data set, we provide new insights into Valanginian climate conditions from a wide range of palaeolatitudes. We highlight climate trends within specific areas and identify main climate belts. In the Proto-North Atlantic realm (~15–17°N) large amou…