Javier Houspanossian

National Scientific and Technical Research Council | conicet

While most landscapes respond to extreme rainfalls with increased surface water outflows, very flat and poorly drained ones have little capacity to do this and their most common responses include (i) increased water storage leading to rising water tables and floods, (ii) increased evaporative water losses and, after reaching high levels of storage,...

The Dry Chaco is a semi-arid ecoregion in South America that hosts one of the largest dry forests in the world, but expansion of dryland agriculture and cattle ranching led to gradual conversion of native vegetation to anthropogenic land cover. The potential impact of these newly established agricultural lands on the surrounding environment is of g...

As global warming intensifies climatic extremes, the need to understand their effects on farming systems, particularly under rainfed conditions, grows. During the last three decades the Argentine Pampas, a major global grain exporter, hosted an unprecedented expansion of cultivation under unirrigated and undrained conditions. Simultaneously, the ex...

Regional effects of farming on hydrology are associated mostly with irrigation. In this work, we show how rainfed agriculture can also leave large-scale imprints. The extent and speed of farming expansion across the South American plains over the past four decades provide an unprecedented case of the effects of rainfed farming on hydrology. Remote...

Plain Language Summary While in ideal landscapes surface water should display the same spatial distribution across the expansion and recession stages of any flooding event, real dynamics may drift away from this expected pattern. We developed two indices based on remote sensing data to locate where these shifts are important and understand how they...

Rastrilladas are usually conceptualized as indigenous roads that represent the transit of native peoples through their territories. As material expressions of circulation in the landscape, we believe they reflect a set of plots of relationships and territorialities devel oped over time. For this work, we focus on where most of the rastrilladas used...

Over the last decades, the rapid replacement of native forests by crops and pastures in the Argentinean semiarid Chaco plains has triggered unprecedented groundwater level raises resulting from deep drainage increases, leading to the first massive waterlogging event on records (~25.000 Ha flooded in 2015 near Bandera, one of the most cultivated clu...

The presence of large water masses influences the thermal regime of nearby land shaping the local climate of coastal areas by the ocean or large continental lakes. Large surface water bodies have an ephemeral nature in the vast sedimentary plains of the Pampas (Argentina) where non-flooded periods alternate with flooding cycles covering up to one t...

Covering 16% of global land surface, dry forests play a key role in the global carbon budget. The Southern Hemisphere still preserves a high proportion of its native dry forest cover, but deforestation rates have increased dramatically in the last decades. In this paper, we quantified for the first time the magnitude and temporal variability of car...

Soil evaporation is a dominant water flux of flat dry ecosystems, reducing available water for plant transpiration. Vegetation plays a key role at controlling evaporation, especially by altering soil surface micro-meteorological conditions. Here we explored the vegetation cover effect on soil evaporation, differentiating the effects of canopy cover...

Deforestation affects climate and the energy balance of the Earth not only through the release of greenhouse gases but also through shifts in the physical properties of the surface. These physical effects can be strongly dependent not only on the deforestation event but on the land use choices and management that follow it. Here we explored how the...

In this paper we explored how aridity influences the regional deforestation and land-use patterns (i.e. crops/pastures) in South American Dry Chaco. To do this, we contrasted land use during last decade (2001–2012) with a spatially explicit aridity index, which we complemented with a crop water balance model. Land-use classifications were performed...

Like in other semiarid areas of the world, farming systems in semiarid Chaco tend to use water-conservative crop systems to minimize production risks associated to water stress. While this strategy aims to stabilize crop yields and farmers income, the underutilization of water resources in wet years may result in heavy deep drainage water losses wh...

Land cover changes may affect climate and the energy balance of the Earth through their influence on the greenhouse gas composition of the atmosphere (biogeochemical effects) but also through shifts in the physical properties of the land surface (biophysical effects). We explored how the radiation budget changes following the replacement of tempera...

The radiometric Temperature measured from a plant is result of a complex equilibrium between a steam of mechanisms physics, physiologic and climate that alter it and modify it in different ways and intensity. Between some, there are the evapo-transpiration, the radiation incident, the fractional vegetation cover, and humidity of the soil. The water...

Resumen Conocer las condiciones hídricas (CH) de la superficie con una periodicidad adecuada es fundamental para estudios agronómicos e hidrológicos entre otros. El presente trabajo muestra los resultados de la aplicación de un modelo que permite la estimación de las CH a partir de datos captados por sensores a bordo de satélites. Las CH se estiman...