Patricio N. Magliano

Grupo de Estudios Ambientales (CONICET-Universidad Nacional de San Luis)

Plant invasion is one of the major global environmental threats with the potential to alter the ecosystem stability and functioning. In water-limited ecosystems, the impacts of non-native invasive trees on the water balance are particularly relevant since they can compromise the use of water by native taxa of the ecosystem and water provision for h...

Citation: Niborski, M.J.; Martin, O.A.; Murray, F.; Jobbágy, E.G.; Nosetto, M.D.; Paez, R.A.; Magliano, P.N. Modeling Rainwater Harvesting and Storage Dynamics of Rural Impoundments in Dry Chaco Rangelands. Water 2023, 15, 2353. Abstract: Transporting water to supply livestock is one of the great challenges of the drylands. Ranchers usually make im...

Livestock production in drylands requires consideration of the ecological applications of ecohydrological redistribution of water. Intensive cattle trampling and the associated increase of surface runoff are common concerns for rangeland productivity and sustainability. Here, we highlight a regional livestock production system in which cattle trail...

Las regiones áridas tienen déficit hídrico a lo largo de todo el año, lo cual limita el crecimiento de la vegetación y la provisión de agua para bebida animal. El Chaco Árido (~10 Mha) sostiene una producción ganadera extensiva de baja inversión, basada en cosechar agua de lluvia en represas (tajamares) como principal fuente de abastecimiento de ag...

Rainfall partitioning by plant canopies can play key roles in dryland ecohydrology by altering the amount, timing and patterns of water receipt to soils. Here, we synthesized interception, throughfall and stemflow observations from 2,297 rainfall events across 40 dryland sites, including 48 plant species. Then, we developed general empirical models...

Land use changes affecting ecological and hydrological processes often shape the biogeochemistry of deserts. As highly productive hotspots, Prosopis flexuosa woodlands located in interdune lowlands of the Monte Desert are subject to intense transformations by humans and livestock and offer a unique opportunity to understand how phreatophyte vegetat...

Aim: Invasive species have the potential to alter hydrological processes by changing the local water balance. However, general patterns of how rainfall is partitioned into interception, throughfall and stemflow for invasive species worldwide have been seldom explored. We (a) describe the percentage of interception, throughfall and stemflow for inva...

Land-use change has been the strongest driver of vegetation cover change in the world. In the South American Dry Chaco (~1 M km²; PPT/ET0 < 0.65), native dry forests are experiencing high deforestation rates that tend to continue in the coming years. Here, we used a hydrological model (Hydrus 1-D) to analyze changes in the water balance triggered b...

The replacement of native dry forests by commercial (exotic) tree plantations could generate changes in rainfall partitioning, which further affects the water cycle. In this study, we determined (i) the rainfall partitioning into interception, throughfall and stemflow, (ii) the role of rainfall event size on rainfall partitioning, (iii) the pH of w...

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 dry forests of South America are a key player of the global carbon cycle and the regional water cycle but they are being intensively deforested. We used eddy covariance measurements to compare the temporal patterns of CO2 and water vapor fluxes and their relationships with environmental variables in dry forest and pastures sites of central Arge...

Vegetation canopy plays a key role in the local water balance by partitioning rainfall into interception, throughfall and stemflow in dry forests. Many invasive plants have the capacity to replace native species and alter the net amount and spatial distribution of rainfall reaching the soil. In this paper, we aimed to compare the rainfall partition...

Rainwater harvesting and associated storage is essential for cattle ranching in the drylands of Argentina and elsewhere. This is the first study to attempt to quantify the hydrological inflows and losses from rainwater harvesting impoundments. To address the direct effect of cattle within impoundments, a typical cattle-affected impoundment was inst...

Rainfall partitioning into interception loss, throughfall and stemflow affects the amount and the spatial heterogeneity of water entering into the soil at the patch scale, strongly controlling net primary productivity of drylands. In this paper, we explored rainfall partitioning and its biophysical controls in Larrea divaricata (jarilla), one of th...

The net amount of rainfall entering into the soil and its spatial distribution at the patch scale are key drivers of ecosystem processes in drylands. The spatial distribution of water is mainly controlled by vegetation canopy which determines the partitioning of rainfall into interception, throughfall and stemflow. In this paper, we synthesized and...

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...

The conversion of dry woody rangelands into pastures can alter key soil physical properties that regulate ecosystem water circulation and storage. Based on three paired stands of native woodlands and pastures established 20 years ago in the southern Dry Chaco (San Luis, Argentina), we described contrasts in five soil physical properties using a sys...

Vegetation plays an important part in regulating water fluxes in ecosystems, specially in dry regions where a large fraction of precipitation is evapotranspirated. Here, we assessed how the replacement of native dry forests by pastures, with the aim of increasing livestock production, affects water flux partition in the Arid Chaco plains. We charac...

Vegetation plays an important part in regulating water fuxes in ecosystems, specially in dry regions where a large fraction of precipitation is evapotranspirated. Here, we assessed how the replacement of native dry forests by pastures, with the aim of increasing livestock production, affects water fux partition in the Arid Chaco plains. We characte...

Effectively managing net primary productivity in drylands, for grazing and other uses, depends on understanding how limited rainfall input is redistributed by runoff and runon among vegetation patches, particularly for patches that contrast between lesser and greater amounts of vegetation cover. Due in part to data limitations, ecohydrologists gene...

The annual amount of precipitation inputs received by a site during a full year is considered a dominant spatial and temporal control of primary productivity and other related process in arid to subhumid ecosystems. However, to be effectively used by plants, these inputs have to escape runoff, favoured by large and less frequent precipitation event...

The negative relationship between grain size (percentage >2.5 mm) and protein content usually observed in barley grain samples is attributed to the presence of thin grains. The objective of this study was to determine whether, in grain samples from a given environment, thin grains had a different protein content than plump grains. Grain samples fro...

The annual amount of precipitation inputs received by a site during a full year is considered a dominant spatial and temporal control of primary productivity and other related process in arid to subhumid ecosystems. However, to be effectively used by plants, these inputs have to escape runoff, favored by large and less frequent precipitation events...