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Authors: Landl, M.; Advisor: -; Participants: Schnepf, A.; Uteau, D.; Peth, S.; Athmann, M.; Kautz, T.; Perkons, U.; Vereecken, H.; Vanderborght, J. (2019) - The model was calibrated against observed root length densities in both the bulk soil and biopores by optimizing root growth model input parameters. By implementing known interactions between root growth and soil penetration resistance into our model, we could simulate root systems whose response to biopores in the soil corresponded well to experimental observations described in the literature, such as increased total root length and increased rooting depth. For all considered soil physical (soil texture and bulk density) and environmental conditions (years of varying dryness), we found biopores to substantially mitigate transpiration deficits in times of drought by allowing roots to take up water from wetter and deeper soil layers. This was even the case when assuming reduced root ...
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Authors: Cai, C.; Advisor: -; Participants: Vanderborght, J.; Couvreur, V.; Mboh, C.M.; Vereecken, H. (2018) - These models were implemented in HYDRUS‐1D, and soil hydraulic parameters were optimized by inverse modeling using soil water content and potential measurements and observations of root distributions of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in horizontally installed rhizotubes. Soil moisture was equally well predicted by the three models, and the soil hydraulic parameters optimized by the models with compensation were comparable. The obtained RWU parameters of the Feddes–Jarvis model were consistent with data reported in the literature, although the pressure heads h3l and h3h for lower and higher transpirations rates, respectively, could not be uniquely identified. Response surfaces of the objective function showed that the root‐related parameters of the Couvreur model could be identi...
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Authors: Groh, J.; Advisor: -; Participants: Stumpp, C.; Lücke, A.; Pütz, T.; Vanderborght, J.; Vereecken, H. (2018) - We used different optimization strategies to investigate which observation types are necessary for simultaneously estimating soil hydraulic and solute transport parameters. Combining water content, matric potential, and tracer (e.g., δ18O) data in one objective function (OF) was found to be the best strategy for estimating parameters that can simulate all observed water flow and solute transport variables. A sequential optimization, in which first an OF with only water flow variables and subsequently an OF with transport variables was optimized, performed slightly worse indicating that transport variables contained additional information for estimating soil hydraulic parameters. Hydraulic parameters that were obtained from optimizing OFs that used either water contents or matric pot...
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Authors: Merz, S.; Advisor: -; Participants: Balcom, B.J.; Enjilela, R.; Vanderborght, J.; Rothfuss, Y.; Vereecken, H.; Pohlmeier, A. (2018) - Evaporation from bare soil surfaces can be restrained to a great extent with the development of a dry layer at the soil surface where capillary hydraulic conductance ceases and water flow proceeds only by gas phase transport. Model calculations and preliminary experiments with model porous media have shown that this surface layer can be very thin. An accurate characterization of these processes is required, which is provided by noninvasive magnetic resonance (MR) methods. The evaporative drying of a silt loam and a sandy loam was monitored at high spatial resolution in laboratory experiments. The MR data were used to assess the performance of two numerical models: (i) the Richards equation, which considers isothermal liquid water flow, and (ii) a coupled soil water, heat, and vapor ...
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Authors: Rahmati, M.; Advisor: -; Participants: Groh, J.; Graf, A.; Pütz, T.; Vanderborght, J.; Vereecken, H. (2020) - All components of the water balance were determined from 2012 until 2018. Budyko analysis was used to characterize the hydrological status of the studied sites. Wavelet analysis was also applied to study the power spectrum of ETa, vegetation‐height‐adjusted reference evapotranspiration (ETcrop), and water stress index (WSI) defined as ETa/ETcrop, as well as SWC at three different depths and the coherence between SWC and ETa and WSI. The Budyko analysis showed that 2018 resulted in a shift of both locations towards more water‐limited conditions, although Rollesbroich remained an energy‐limited system. Based on the power spectrum analysis, the annual timescale is the dominant scale for the temporal variability of ETa, ETcrop, and SWC. The results also showed that increasing dryness at...
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Authors: Rahmati, M.; Advisor: -; Participants: Vanderborght, J.; Šimůnek, J.; Vrugt, J.A.; Moret‐Fernández, D.; Latorre, B.; Lassabatere, L.; Vereecken, H. (2020) - We demonstrate the usefulness and power of the CTM by comparing it with a suite of existing methods using synthetic cumulative infiltration data simulated by HYDRUS‐1D for 12 synthetic soils reflecting different USDA textural classes, as well as experimental data selected from the Soil Water Infiltration Global (SWIG) database. Results demonstrate that the inferred values of S and Ks are in excellent agreement with their theoretical values used in the synthetically simulated infiltration experiments with Nash–Sutcliffe criterion close to unity and RMSE values of 0.04 cm h−1/2 and 0.05 cm h−1, respectively. The CTM also showed very high accuracy when applied on synthetic data with added measurement noise, as well as robustness when applied to experimental data. Unlike previously publ...
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Authors: Klotzsche, A.; Advisor: -; Participants: Lärm, L.; Vanderborght, J.; Cai, G.; Morandage, S.; Zörner, M.; Vereecken, H.; van der Kruk, J. (2019) - The SWC data were analyzed for four growing seasons between 2014 and 2017, two soil types (gravelly and clayey–silty), two crops (wheat [Triticum aestivum L.] and maize [Zea mays L.]), and three different water treatments. We acquired more than 150 time‐lapse GPR datasets along 6‐m‐long horizontal crossholes at six depths. The GPR SWC distributions are distinct both horizontally and vertically for both soil types. A clear change in SWC can be observed at both sites between the surface layer (>0.3 m) and subsoil. Alternating patches of higher and lower SWC, probably caused by the soil heterogeneity, were observed along the horizontal SWC profiles. To investigate the changes in SWC with time, GPR and time‐domain reflectometry (TDR) data were averaged for each depth and compared with c...
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