Altitudinal and temporal evapotranspiration dynamics via remote sensing and vegetation index-based modelling over a scarce-monitored, high-altitudinal Andean páramo ecosystem of Southern Ecuador

Climate Vulnerability Assessment of the Espeletia Complex on Páramo Sky Islands in the Northern Andes

“…Despite statistical imputation-like approaches such as environmental downscaling have been considered to model climate at a higher resolution for specific Páramo complexes (Mavárez et al, 2018), consistently applying such techniques across cordilleras seems unfeasible because accuracy would be constrained by the accessibility of fine-scale bioclimatic data from regional weather stations. These restraints are likely to be overcome soon by incorporating microclimate into SDMs (Lembrechts et al, 2019) through mechanistic algorithms (Lembrechts and Lenoir, 2020) physiological models (Cortés et al, 2013;López-Hernández and Cortés, 2019), hydrological equations (Rodríguez- Morales et al, 2019;Correa et al, 2020), in situ data logging, and remote sensing (Ramón-Reinozo et al, 2019;Zellweger et al, 2019).…”

A concerted research effort to advance the hydrological understanding of tropical páramos

“…These publications triggered a rapidly increasing community of research and practice around the hydrology, ecology, and climatology of páramos, featuring a variety of innovative techniques, intensive monitoring, and model‐based regionalization approaches to improve understanding of hydrological processes and the effect of external pressures. In such emerging research, field‐experimental based studies started assessing previously ignored variables such as precipitation structure (Orellana‐Alvear, Célleri, Rollenbeck, & Bendix, 2017; Padrón, Wilcox, Crespo, & Célleri, 2015) and clarifying less known processes such as interception (Ochoa‐Sánchez, Crespo, & Célleri, 2018), evapotranspiration (Carrillo‐Rojas, Silva, Rollenbeck, Célleri, & Bendix, 2019; Córdova, Carrillo‐Rojas, Crespo, Wilcox, & Célleri, 2015; Ramón‐Reinozo, Ballari, Cabrera, Crespo, & Carrillo‐Rojas, 2019), and carbon and nutrient concentrations in soil and vegetation (Minaya, Corzo, van der Kwast, & Mynett, 2016; Peña‐Quemba, Rubiano‐Sanabria, & Riveros‐Iregui, 2016; Pesántez, Mosquera, Crespo, Breuer, & Windhorst, 2018; Riveros‐Iregui et al, 2018). For example, the use of conservative and bio‐reactive tracers enlightened hydrological process understanding and allowed tracking and quantifying fluxes, storage and mixing, and assisted in defining the spatial–temporal dynamics of runoff sources and flow pathways (Correa et al, 2017; Esquivel‐Hernández et al, 2018; Minaya, Camacho Suarez, Wenninger, & Mynett, 2016; Mosquera et al, 2016; Riveros‐Iregui et al, 2018).…”

Assessment of Remotely Sensed Near-Surface Soil Moisture for Distributed Eco-Hydrological Model Implementation

“…Hence, the selected soil moisture-based approach showed an acceptable performance in terms of discharges, presenting a negligible decrease in the validation period (∆NSE = 0.1) and greater sensitivity to the spatio-temporal variables' spatial representation.Currently there is a high availability of satellite data, almost in real time, with sufficient spatio-temporal resolutions (30 m-25 km) for ecohydrology in most cases and with a spatial distribution covering the entire earth. Among the sources of satellite information that can be used in ecohydrology, the following stand out: real evapotranspiration [19][20][21][22], land surface temperature [23,24], different vegetation indices [25][26][27], near-surface soil moisture (hereafter SM), [28][29][30][31][32] and more recently total water storage anomaly [33].Soil moisture plays a key role in the hydrological cycle, due to its influence on many processes that directly or indirectly affect the water balance, such as: vegetation growth, hydraulic properties of the ground, evapotranspiration, runoff generation and the processes of infiltration and deep percolation [13,30,[34][35][36][37]. Despite their importance, SM in-situ measurements are still uncommon in time and space [38,39].…”

“…Currently there is a high availability of satellite data, almost in real time, with sufficient spatio-temporal resolutions (30 m-25 km) for ecohydrology in most cases and with a spatial distribution covering the entire earth. Among the sources of satellite information that can be used in ecohydrology, the following stand out: real evapotranspiration [19][20][21][22], land surface temperature [23,24], different vegetation indices [25][26][27], near-surface soil moisture (hereafter SM), [28][29][30][31][32] and more recently total water storage anomaly [33].…”