Biocrusts intensify water redistribution and improve water availability to dryland vegetation: insights from a spatially-explicit ecohydrological model.

ABSTRACT: Biocrusts are ecosystem engineers in drylands and structure the landscape through their ecohydrological effects. They regulate soil infiltration and evaporation but also surface water redistribution, providing important resources for vascular vegetation. Spatially-explicit ecohydrological models are useful tools to explore such ecohydrological mechanisms, but biocrusts have rarely been included in them. We contribute to closing this gap and assess how biocrusts shape spatio-temporal water fluxes and availability in a dryland landscape and how landscape hydrology is affected by climate-change induced shifts in the biocrust community. We extended the spatially-explicit, process-based ecohydrological dryland model EcoHyD by a biocrust layer which modifies water in- and outputs from the soil a

SUBMITTER: Baldauf S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10337590 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature