Spatial Variability and Temporal Stability of Local Net Precipitation Patterns

Rainfall interception and redistribution by a common North American understory and pasture forb, <i>Eupatorium capillifolium</i> (Lam. dogfennel)

“…Throughfall gauges consisted of nine randomly placed funnels (506.7 cm 2 collection area each), three per dogfennel clump (1520.1 cm 2 total collection area per clump), connected to high-density polyethylene (HDPE) bottles that were manually measured with graduated cylinders immediately after a storm ended (within 4 h). The total canopy area of dogfennel plants at this site rarely exceed 2000 cm 2 ; thus, the total throughfall gauge area per clump generally represented > 75 % of canopy area, which is a comparatively much larger gauge-to-canopy area than most past throughfall studies on forest canopies (Van Stan et al, 2020). Standard stemflow measurement methods developed for woody plants (use of flexible tubing wrapped around a woody stem; Sadeghi et al, 2020) are not suitable for dogfen-nel; moreover, no standard stemflow collection devices exist for herbaceous plants.…”

“…In fact, several long-standing (and hitherto unanswered) calls for greater research on the precipitation partitioning of nonwoody plants (rooted in detailed observations) have been made (Price et al, 1997;Price and Watters, 1989;Verry and Timmons, 1977;Yarie, 1980). These are general questions identified by the community; however, in this study we focus on the following research question: how is overstory throughfall (P T,o : Fig.…”

“…Most observations of precipitation partitioning beneath any plant besides overstory woody plants have been done on maize (Zheng et al, 2019, and references therein) and other cash crops (Drastig et al, 2019, and references therein), which leave plants of forest understories, grasslands or pasturelands relatively unstudied. Even the few studies on forest understory interception, P T , and P S overwhelmingly focus, again, on woody plants (González-Martínez et al, 2017;Price and Watters, 1989), limiting net precipitation observations beneath understory herbaceous plants to ferns (Verry and Timmons, 1977) and nonvascular plants (Price et al, 1997). These scant observations, however, indicate that precipitation partitioning by nonwoody understory plants is hydrologically relevant, as they can store as much water as woody plants (Klamerus-Iwan et al, 2020), evaporate significant portions of P T,o and redistribute 7 %-90 % of event P T,o as P S (Sadeghi et al, 2020).…”

Neighbourhood and stand structure affect stemflow generation in a heterogeneous deciduous temperate forest

“…This is probably because elaborate sampling is required to capture stemflow variance: a random and representative sample is needed, encompassing a high coverage and extent within the study stand. The limited data that are available show that stemflow variation is substantial, and higher for stemflow than for throughfall (Metzger et al, 2017;van Stan et al, 2019). Thus, stemflow contributes importantly and even primarily to net precipitation heterogeneity and flux hot and cold spots and moments.…”

Early European Observations of Precipitation Partitioning by Vegetation: A Synthesis and Evaluation of 19th Century Findings

“…No apparent trends appear to exist in Hoppe's [38] throughfall data with regard to spatial variability and proximity to the nearest stem ( Table 5). Despite these detailed throughfall observations, internationally, Hoppe [38] is most commonly cited for its stemflow data, and it took >50 years before detailed spatial interpolation maps would be developed for throughfall in search of spatial structures, by Linskens [67,68] (an English version of this can be found in [62]). variables, with contradictory results [54][55][56][57][58][59][60].…”