Hydrology of Plants: Modeling the interaction between Infiltration and Evapotranspiration

Measuring and modeling of water and solute fluxes across soil-plant-atmosphere is nowadays a very important challenge because of the complexity of both soil and plants. In particular evapotranspiration is related with radiation and temperature (the energy budget), relative humidity and wind (the momentum exchange budget) but it depends also by the water content in soil (the water mass budget) since non exiting water cannot evaporate and soil drying is imposing bottlenecks to evaporation. To consider these effects an appropriate use of the knowledge of soil suction and hydraulic conductivity has to be made. Considering the problem one-dimensional, we implement a virtual lysimeter model in which we coupled infiltration and evapotranspiration by using stress factors and Richards’ equation. In addition, we implemented tools for the determination of travel times of water within vegetation, accounting for the growing of the roots and in general the growing of the plants. This contribution presents the code which uses the Object Modelling System infrastructure, its design and the preliminary results of few virtual experiments exploiting the capabilities of the joint soil-plant modelling.