The impact of regional climate change on net primary productivity (NPP) is an important aspect in the study of ecosystems' response to global climate change. China's ecosystems are very sensitive to climate change owing to the influence of the East Asian monsoon. The Lund-Potsdam-Jena Dynamic Global Vegetation Model for China (LPJ-CN), a global dynamical vegetation model developed for China's t...

The last accidents of the nuclear power plant (NPP) in Chernobyl and Fukushima give us the new inspiration to verify the safety level of the NPP structures. This paper presents the new requirements to test the safety and reliability of the NPP structures due to the recent accidents in the world. The IAEA in Vienna required in the document ‘Stress tests’ the verification of the safety of the NPP...

Spatial scaling is of particular importance in remote sensing applications to terrestrial ecosystems where spatial heterogeneity is the norm. Surface parameters derived at different resolutions can be considerably different even though they are derived using the same algorithms or models. This article addresses issues related to spatial scaling of net primary productivity (NPP). The main object...

Previous studies have found that urbanization often decreases net primary production (NPP), an important integrative measure of ecosystem functioning. In arid environments, however, urbanization may boost productivity by introducing highly productive plant communities and weakening the coupling of plant growth to naturally occurring cycles of water and nutrients. We tested these ideas by compar...

The necessity of a theory of General Topology and, most of all, of Algebraic Topology on locally finite metric spaces comes from many areas of research in both Applied and Pure Mathematics: Molecular Biology, Mathematical Chemistry, Computer Science, Topological Graph Theory and Metric Geometry. In this paper we propose the basic notions of such a theory and some applications: we replace the cl...

Global changes in climate, atmospheric composition, and pollutants are altering ecosystems and the goods and services they provide. Among approaches for predicting ecosystem responses, long-term observations and manipulative experiments can be powerful approaches for resolving single-factor and interactive effects of global changes on key metrics such as net primary production (NPP). Here we co...

Frequency and severity of droughts were projected to increase in many regions. However, their effects of temporal dynamics on the terrestrial carbon cycle remain uncertain, and hence deserve further investigation. In this paper, the droughts that occurred in China during 2001-2010 were identified by using the standardized precipitation index (SPI). Standardized anomaly index (SAI), which has be...

Centromeres form a chromosomal platform for the assembly of the kinetochores, which are required for orderly chromosome segregation. Assembly of both centromeres and kinetochores proceeds by a step-by-step mechanism that is regulated in time and space. It has been suggested that the regulated nuclear import of centromeric proteins is involved in this process. We show that the knockdown of nucle...

Development of repeatable and quantitative tools are necessary for determining the abundance and distribution of different types of benthic habitats, detecting changes to these ecosystems, and determining their role in the global carbon cycle. Here we used ocean color remote sensing techniques to map different major groups of primary producers and estimate net primary productivity (NPP) across ...

Considerable progress has been made in our ability to model and measure annual gross primary production (GPP) by terrestrial vegetation. But challenges remain in estimating maintenance respiration (R(m)) and net primary production (NPP). To search for possible common relationships, we assembled annual carbon budgets from six evergreen and one deciduous forest in Oregon, USA, three pine plantati...