Species-specific traits determine shrub-annual interactions during a growing season

Stress gradient hypothesis predicted that facilitative interactions usually increase in intensity and are importance with abiotic stress.By contrast,facilitation may be lost in time,when it involves the growth of benefactors or beneficiaries.Less is known about which response pattern is more common in arid desert.We present an empirical study to explore shrub-annual interactions at the community and individual level along the course of a single growing season in a desert steppe in northwest China.Here the severity of drought stress may increase in time due to uneven precipitation during plant growing season.We assessed growth responses of annuals in understory where two dominant shrubs were removed.Annuals responses showed a switch from weakly positive to more strongly positive beneath Calligonum mongolicum,whereas from positive to negative beneath Nitraria sphaerocarpa during the growing season.Additionally,annual species with contrasting functional traits showed distinct growth responses to canopies removal.There was evidence of an increase in soil moisture below the canopy of shrubs,but a decrease in potential evaporation rate and photosynthetically active radiation,which can partly explain these species-specific responses.We conclude that the balance between competitive and facilitative effects in shrub-annual interactions is not only governed by the severity of stress but also determined by plant traits,such as canopy structure of shrubs and functional traits of their understory annuals.

A New Optimal Hatch Filter to Minimize the Effects of Ionosphere Gradients for GBAS

At present, the main problem faced by ground-based augment system （GBAS） is that though carder smoothing filter and local differential global positioning system （LDGPS） improve the accuracy of the pseudorange by reducing the noise in it and eliminating almost all the common errors between the user and the reference station, they also cause extra errors on account of the effects of the ionosphere temporal and spatial gradients. Based on the analysis of these errors as well as the smoothing noise, this article suggests a new algorithm to design the optimal Hatch filter, whose smoothing window width varies real-time with the satellite elevation, ionosphere variation, and distance from the user to the reference station. By conducting the positioning process in the GBAS emulation platform for several hours and after its comparison with the performances of traditional Hatch filters, it is found that the errors in the differential correction become smaller and the positioning accuracy gets heightened with this new method.