An arid region with an area of 100 km2 in northwestern China consisted of desert, cropland and wetland was investigated.
The densities of SOC in the 3-m profiles were 59.35, 149.6 and 174.4 Mg ha− 1 for desert, cropland and wetland, respectively.
The SOC in the 1 3 m layer represented 67.0, 52.7 and 58.0% of the total SOC stored in the 0 3 m profiles of desert, cropland and wetland, respectively.
The sites included arctic tundra, boreal forest, temperate hardwood forest, temperate conifer forest, tropical rain forest, tallgrass prairie, desert grassland, and cropland.
The spatial pattern of the SWC was more time stable for the land use pattern, followed by desert, shelterbelt, and cropland.
The standard deviation of the SWC versus the mean SWC exhibited a convex upward relationship in the shelterbelt with the greatest spatial variation at the SWC of around 22.0%, whereas a linearly increasing relationship was observed for the cropland, desert, and land use pattern.
The metropolitan area is a widespread heterogeneous patchwork of impervious surfaces and human made landscapes, interspersed with remnants of the Sonoran desert, pasture and irrigated cropland [62].
Albedo errors are calculated against bi-directional reflectance data obtained from NASA airborne campaigns made by the Cloud Absorption Radiometer for the seven major surface types, binned using MODIS' land cover map – water, forest, cropland, grassland, snow, desert and cities.
In this study, the spatial variance and temporal stability of SWC were investigated in a cropland-shelterbelt-desert site at the oasis-desert ecotone in the middle of the Heihe River Basin, China.
For this objective, the volumetric soil water content and plant root distribution was measured to 300 cm depth along a cropland-treebelt-desert site at the oasis-desert ecotone in the Heihe River Basin, China.
The hydrological relation in the lower soil layer among cropland-treebelt-desert was caused by groundwater recharge, as cropland irrigation raised up the groundwater level to replenish the deep soil layer.
