Visualisation of flooding along an unvegetated, ephemeral river using Google Earth Engine: Implications for assessment of channel-floodplain dynamics in a time of rapid environmental change.

Given rapid environmental change, the development of new, data-driven, interdisciplinary approaches is essential for improving assessment and management of river systems, especially with respect to flooding. In the world's extensive drylands, difficulties in obtaining field observations of major hydrological events mean that remote sensing techniques are commonly used to map river floods and assess flood impacts. Such techniques, however, are dependent on available cloud-free imagery during or immediately after peak discharge, and single images may omit important flood-related hydrogeomorphological events.

Effects of vegetation on bacterial communities, carbon and nitrogen in dryland soil surfaces: implications for shrub encroachment in the southwest Kalahari.

Shrub encroachment is occurring in many of the world's drylands, but its impacts on ecosystem structure and function are still poorly understood. In particular, it remains unclear how shrub encroachment affects dryland soil surfaces, including biological soil crust (biocrust) communities. In this study, soil surfaces (0-1 cm depth) were sampled from areas of Grewia flava shrubs and Eragrostis lehmanniana and Schmidtia kalahariensis grasses in the southwest Kalahari during two different seasons (March and November).

Small-Scale Spatial Heterogeneity of Photosynthetic Fluorescence Associated with Biological Soil Crust Succession in the Tengger Desert, China.

In dryland regions, biological soil crusts (BSCs) have numerous important ecosystem functions. Crust species and functions are, however, highly spatially heterogeneous and remain poorly understood at a range of scales. In this study, chlorophyll fluorescence imaging was used to quantify millimeter-scale patterns in the distribution and activity of photosynthetic organisms in BSCs of different successional stages (including cyanobacterial, lichen, moss three main successional stages and three intermixed transitional stages) from the Tengger Desert, China.

Product vs. process? The role of geomorphology in wetland characterization.

Wetland classification has become a primary tool to characterize and inventory wetland landscapes, but wetlands are difficult to classify because they straddle the terrestrial and aquatic boundary and occur in a variety of hydroclimatic and topographic settings. Presently, many ecological wetland classification schemes are focused on the 'hydrogeomorphic' unit, which attempts to account for the physical setting of a wetland. In many cases topographic terms (e.

New investigations at Kalambo Falls, Zambia: Luminescence chronology, site formation, and archaeological significance.

Fluvial deposits can provide excellent archives of early hominin activity but may be complex to interpret, especially without extensive geochronology. The Stone Age site of Kalambo Falls, northern Zambia, has yielded a rich artefact record from dominantly fluvial deposits, but its significance has been restricted by uncertainties over site formation processes and a limited chronology. Our new investigations in the centre of the Kalambo Basin have used luminescence to provide a chronology and have provided key insights into the geomorphological and sedimentological processes involved in site formation.