A modelling approach to simulating vegetation dynamics is described, incorporating critical processes of carbon sequestration, growth, mortality and distribution. The model has been developed to investigate the responses of vegetation to environmental change, at time scales from days to centuries and from the local to the global scale. The model is outlined and subsequent tests, against indepen...

Vegetation ecology is usually divided into two broad research areas, floristic/environmental gradient analysis and studies of vegetation dynamics. The early influential American ecologist Clements combined the two areas into a dynamic system for classifying vegetation. His succession and climax theory, however, was later severely criticized. A new approach to the study of distributional dynamic...

Monthly data from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) and its predecessor satellite sensors was used to reconstruct vegetation dynamics in response to climate patterns over the period 1983–2005. Results suggest that plant growth over extensive land areas of southern Africa and Central Asia were the most closely coupled of any major land area to El Niño–southern oscillation...

By integrating a wide range of experimental, comparative, and theoretical approaches, ecologists are starting to gain a detailed understanding of the long-term dynamics of vegetation. We explore how patterns of variation in demographic traits among species have provided insight into the processes that structure plant communities. We find a common set of mechanisms, derived from ecological and e...

On the importance of including vegetation dynamics in Budyko’s hydrological model R. J. Donohue, M. L. Roderick, and T. R. McVicar Ecosystem Dynamics Group, Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia CSIRO Land and Water, Black Mountain, ACT 2601, Australia Received: 20 January 2006 – Accepted: 29 May 2006 – Published: 12 July 2006 Corr...

The watershed (DAS) Deli is one of the priority watersheds in the Medium Term Development Plan in 2010-2014 according to the Ministry of Forestry decree (SK 328/Menhut-II/2009), Indonesia. DAS is a complex ecological system in which there is a dynamic equilibrium between the incoming material energy (input) and the material out (output). Naturally, the change in input and output balance is slow...

Monitoring post-fire vegetation response using remotely-sensed images is a top priority for post-fire management. This study investigated the potential of very-high-resolution (VHR) GeoEye images on detecting the field-measured burn severity of a forest fire that occurred in Evros (Greece) during summer 2011. To do so, we analysed the role of topographic conditions and burn severity, as measure...

Deconstructing the drivers of large-scale vegetation change is critical to predicting and managing projected climate and land use changes that will affect regional vegetation cover in degraded or threated ecosystems. We investigate the shared dynamics of spatially variable vegetation across three large watersheds in the southern Africa savanna. Dynamic Factor Analysis (DFA), a multivariate time...