Publications by authors named "Ana M Tarquis"

Pruning determines the plant water status due to its effects on the leaf area and thus the irrigation management. The primary aim of this study was to assess the use of high-resolution multispectral imagery to estimate the plant water status through different bands and vegetation indexes (VIs) and to evaluate which is most suitable under different pruning management strategies. This work was carried out in 2021 and 2022 in a commercial Merlot vineyard in an arid area of central Spain.

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Article Synopsis
  • Artificial lighting in Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) enhances crop productivity, with a focus on optimizing CO levels and using luminaires with adjustable spectrum and intensity.
  • Recent experiments on tomato seedlings tested combinations of ten light spectra, seven light intensities, and nine CO concentrations to analyze their impact on CO assimilation.
  • Results indicated that light intensity significantly affects the net assimilation rate of CO, with the best performing spectra being 80R20B and 80B20R, which exhibited higher photosynthetic efficiency compared to other spectra under varying conditions.
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The conversion of native forest into agricultural land, which is common in many parts of the world, poses important questions regarding soil degradation, demanding further efforts to better understand the effect of land use change on soil functions. With the advent of 3D computed tomography techniques and computing power, new methods are becoming available to address this question. In this direction, in the current work we implement a modification of the Fisher-Shannon method, borrowed from information theory, to quantify the complexity of twelve 3D CT soil samples from a sugarcane plantation and twelve samples from a nearby native Atlantic forest in northeastern Brazil.

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Land use and land cover (LULC) scenarios in rural catchment hydrology are crucial to describe the effects of future water dynamics. However, there is a lack of understanding of the effectiveness of including static land covers at the subbasin level to provide inter-annual stability in changing the different water balance components. We developed a step-by-step mapping protocol to extend and enrich the hydrological assessment of future LULC scenarios defined through participatory stakeholder involvement.

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Estimates suggest that more than 70% of the world's rangelands are degraded. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is commonly used by ecologists and agriculturalists to monitor vegetation and contribute to more sustainable rangeland management. This paper aims to explore the scaling character of NDVI and NDVI anomaly (NDVIa) time series by applying three fractal analyses: generalized structure function (GSF), multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA), and Hurst index (HI).

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Article Synopsis
  • - This study explores how climate factors like temperature and precipitation influence the growth of vegetation in semiarid grassland areas in central Spain, focusing on two different Vegetation Indices (VIs).
  • - Researchers found variations in how these VIs responded to temperature and precipitation over time, depending on the specific grassland zone and season, highlighting the complexity of these ecological systems.
  • - The analysis utilized Recurrence Plots (RPs) and Cross Recurrence Plots (CRPs) to reveal that precipitation plays a significant role in vegetation dynamics, showcasing the tools’ effectiveness in studying complex ecological patterns.
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New European directives have proposed the direct application of compost and digestate produced from municipal solid wastes as organic matter sources in agricultural soils. Therefore information about phosphorus leaching from these residues when they are applied to the soil is increasingly important. Leaching experiments were conducted to determine the P mobility in compost and digestate mixtures, supplying equivalent amounts to 100 kg P ha(-1) to three different types of soils.

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