tally a climatic and oceanographic phenomenon, but it has profound effects on terrestrial ecosystems as well. Although the ecological effects of ENSO are becoming increasingly known from a wide range of terrestrial ecosystems (Holmgren et al. 2001; Wright 2005), their impacts have been most intensively studied in arid and semiarid systems. Because inter-annual variability in precipitation is su...

Four weeds (Acorus calamus, Artemisia tridentata, Heliopsis longipes, and Tagetes minuta) and three cultivated plants (Azadirachta indica, Mammea americana, and Ocimum basilicum) are potential candidates for crop development and commercialization for sources of insect attractants, repellants, or toxicants. Although all could be commercially viable, the neem tree (A. indica) is by far the most l...

The climate has important influences on the distribution and structure of forest ecosystems, which may lead to vital feedback to climate change. However, much of the existing work focuses on the changes in carbon fluxes or water cycles due to climate change and/or atmospheric CO 2, and few studies have considered how and to what extent climate change and CO 2 influence the ecosystem structure (...

Land use change can impact the land surface radiation budget and energy balance by changing biophysical processes. Based on satellite remote sensing data from 2000 to 2015, we quantitatively estimated radiative forcing induced cropland expansion during early 21st century in northern China. The results showed that heat flux atmosphere due was quite variable different climate zones. increased hum...

Over the past several thousand years, arid and semiarid China has experienced a series of asynchronous desertification events in its semiarid sandy and desert regions, but the precise identification of the driving forces of such events has remained elusive. In this paper we identify two rapid desertification events (RDEs) at ~4.6 ± 0.2 ka BP and ~3.3 ± 0.2 ka BP from the JJ Profile, located in ...

The annual cycles of soil moisture and NO2 have been analysed across the climate zones of West Africa using two satellite data sets (OMI on AURA and ASCAT on MetOp-A). Exploring the sources and sinks for NO2 it is clear that the densely populated urban cities including Lagos and Abuja had the highest mean NO2 concentrations (>1.8 × 10 15 molecules cm -2 ) indicative of the anthropogenic urban e...

The article analyzes a set of medicinal-plant species in arid and semiarid biomes Russia. diversity medicinal plants general, as well those used to treat diseases various classes, is determined. A statistical analysis the relationships between number regional climatic indices carried out; corresponding thematic schematic maps are constructed analyzed. It shown that related total biome number. T...

Precipitation and air temperature data, only, are often recorded at meteorological stations, with radiation beingmeasured at very few weather stations, especially in developing countries. Therefore there arises a need for suitablemodels to estimate solar radiation for a completion of data sets. This paper is about an evaluation of eight models foran estimation of daily solar radiation (Q) from ...