Ecosystems in alpine mountainous regions are usually more vulnerable and easily be disturbed by environmental change globally. Alpine swamp meadow, a unique grassland type in the eastern Tibetan Plateau which provides important ecosystem services to the upstream and downstream regions of international rivers of Asia even the world, is undergoing severe degradation, which can dramatically alter ...

An algorithm for the estimate of the soil moisture content on a global scale from dual-frequency (Cand Xbands) microwave data of the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) is presented in this paper. The algorithm is based on the brightness temperature at C-band and uses the Polarization Index at X-band to correct for vegetation effects. The retrieval is obtained by inverting a simplif...

Effects of vegetation patterns on yields of the surface and subsurface waters in the Heishui Alpine Valley in west China Y. Liu, S. An, Z. Deng, N. Fan, H. Yang, Z. Wang, Y. Zhi, C. Zhou, and S. Liu Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Global Changes, School of Life Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China Institute of Forest Ecology, Environment and Protection, the Chinese Academy of Fo...

The responses of rain-forest vegetation on Secretary Island (Fiordland National Park) which was subjected to low but sustained browsing by red deer, are compared with those of the full range of mountain vegetation in Mt Aspiring National Park where deer numbers had been reduced substantially from previously high numbers. On Secretary Island the most palatable species have continued to decline W...

The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau has been experiencing a distinct warming trend, and climate warming has a direct and quick impact on the alpine grassland ecosystem. We detected the greenness trend of the grasslands in the plateau using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer data from 2000 to 2009. Weather station data were used to explore the climatic drivers for vegetation greenness variati...

Aim Impacts of global change, such as land-use and climate changes, could produce significant alterations in the elevational patterns of alpine tree line ecotones and their adjacent vegetation zones. Because the responses of the tree line to environmental variations are directly related to successful tree regeneration, understanding recruitment dynamics is an indispensable step in tree line res...