[1] Annual precipitation in the central and southern warm-desert region of North America is distributed climatologically between summer and winter periods with two prominent dry periods between them. We used energy and carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes from eddy covariance along with standard meteorological and soil moisture measurements at a semiarid savanna in southern Arizona, United States, to be...

We present the first synchronously coupled transient simulation of the evolution of the northern Africa climate-ecosystem for the last 6500 years in a global general circulation ocean–atmosphere–terrestrial ecosystem model. The model simulated the major abrupt vegetation collapse in the southern Sahara at about 5 ka, consistent with the proxy records. Local precipitation, however, shows a much ...

Niche description and differentiation at broad geographic scales have been recent major topics in ecology and evolution. Describing the environmental niche structure of sister taxa with known evolutionary trajectories stands out as a useful exercise in understanding niche requirements. Here we model the environmental niche structure and distribution of the recently resolved phylogeography of gu...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Little is known about health impacts of climate in pre-industrial societies. We used historical data to investigate the association of temperature and precipitation with total and age-specific mortality in Skellefteå, northern Sweden, between 1749 and 1859. METHODS We retrieved digitized aggregated population data of the Skellefteå parish, and monthly temperature and preci...

Accurate precipitation data at a high spatial resolution are essential for hydrological, meteorological, and ecological research at regional scales. This study presented a geostatistical downscaling-calibration procedure to derive the high spatial resolution maps of precipitation over a mountainous watershed affected by a monsoon climate. Based on the relationships between precipitation and oth...

Changes in land use might affect the combined C, N and P stoichiometry in soil. The Grain-to-Green Program (GTGP), which converts low-yield croplands or abandoned lands into forest, shrub, and/or grassland, was the largest land reforestation project in China. This study collected the reported C, N and P contents of soil in GTGP zones to achieve the factors driving the changes in the C:N, C:P, a...

Long-term water quality records for assessing natural variability, impact of management, and that guide regulatory processes to safeguard water resources are rare for California oak woodland rangelands. This study presents a 20-yr record (1981-2000) of nitrate-nitrogen (NO(3)-N) and suspended sediment export from a typical, grazed oak woodland watershed (103 ha) in the northern Sierra Nevada fo...

Playas in endorheic basins are of environmental value and highly scientific because of their natural habitats of a wide variety of species and indicators for climatic changes and tectonic activities within continents. Remote sensing, due to its capability of acquiring repetitive data with synoptic coverage, provides a unique tool to monitor and collect spatial information about playas. Most stu...

The relationship between the inter-annual variability of precipitation and satellite derived Outgoing Long-wave Radiations (OLR) is studied over Pakistan during summer months for the period 1980-2007. Principal component analysis technique was applied in order to identify the major modes of oscillations present in the data series. The first four principal components explain 95% of the total var...