Characteristics of rainfall interception for four typical shrubs in Qilian Mountain

Abstract

Rainfall intercepting by vegetation plays an important role affecting the water balance at local and catchment scale due to the control that vegetation canopy exert by modifying both evaporation and the redistribution of incident rainfall. Qilian Mountain is source regions of Heihe River, Shiyang River and Shule River inland river basin. In consideration of widespread shrubs which account for 68% of the whole forest area of Qilian Mountain, the research on rainfall interception process of shrubs for understanding the impact of rainfall characteristics on alpine shrubs and revealing the mechanism of hydrologic cycle and water resources with the impact of the shrub canopy, especially in the mountainous regions of an inland river basin, is very important and necessary. This paper taked the four typical alpine shrubs Potentilla fruticosa, Salix cupularis, Hippophae rhamnoides, and Caragana jubata in Qilian Mountain as test objects, based on the field experimental data from June to October 2010, characteristics of rainfall interception and rainfall redistribution of four typical alpine shrubs in Qilian Mountain was investigated by permanent plot method, and impact of rainfall characteristics on rainfall redistribution of shrubs was analyzed by statistical method. The results indicated that the gross rainfall was 298. 6 mm during the experimental period. Rainfall was intercepted entirely by shrubs when rainfall is less than 2. 1 mm, gross rainfall

Correlations of the root–shoot ratio with soil water content in the patchy alpine grassland of the north‐eastern Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau using electrical resistivity tomography

“…The throughfall percentage of A. splendens is 70.58% (Jiang, 2016), which is greater than that of four typical shrubs in the Qilian Mountains (52.3% to 63.5%) (Liu et al, 2012) and shrubs in global drylands (63%) (Magliano et al, 2018). The canopy architecture of semiarid shrubs serves as an effective funnel to channel stemflow to the root zone and promotes rainfall infiltration (Peng et al, 2013).…”

Controlling Factors of the Spatial‐Temporal Fluctuations in Evapotranspiration Along an Elevation Gradient Across Humid Montane Ecosystems

“…The observations of T f and S f did not apply in SH. However, other studies have found that IL accounted for approximately 35% of ET in shrublands (Liu et al, 2012;Ma et al, 2017). Therefore, combined with the observed ET and P values in SH, a b value of 0.142 was obtained in SH in this study.…”

Datasets for research on groundwater flow and its interactions with surface water in an alpine catchment on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau, China

“…Vegetation is rare in this region, and the vegetation coverage is extremely low (Liu et al, 2012(Liu et al, , 2014.…”

“…This aquifer groundwater is typically discharged to various tributaries in the form of springs near the rivers at the foot of the slope. In this region, alpine meadows are the main vegetation type (Liu et al, 2012;Chen et al, 2014a;Liu et al, 2014).…”

“…There are mainly alpine grassland and herbaceous plants in the areas below 3200 m a.s.l. (Liu et al, 2012). The vegetation types in higher-elevation areas are alpine shrubs (Liu et al, 2014).…”