Article accepted in Advances in Water Resources
An article by Ph.D. candidate Trenton Franz that uses ecohydrological optimality theories to predict woody species distribution in central Kenya has been published in Advances in Water Resources.
The regional distribution of woody vegetation is influenced by the complex interactions between the climate, soil, and vegetation. Combining an existing soil water balance model and a resource trade-off hypothesis we present a framework and solution to the constrained optimization problem for a dryland ecosystem in central Kenya. Using the parsimonious framework we test the influences of changes to total rainfall and/or inter-annual rainfall variability on the spatial composition of three Acacia species in the dryland ecosystem.