A rapid warming in Himalayas is predicted to increase plant upper distributional limits, vegetation cover and abundance of species adapted to warmer climate. We explored these predictions in NW Himalayas, by revisiting uppermost plant populations after ten years (2003-2013), detailed monitoring of vegetation changes in permanent plots (2009-2012), and age analysis of plants growing from 5500 to...

The National Weather Service’s Snow Data Assimilation (SNODAS) program provides daily, gridded estimates of snow depth, snow water equivalent (SWE), and related snow parameters at a 1-km resolution for the conterminous USA. In this study, SNODAS snow depth and SWE estimates were compared with independent, ground-based snow survey data in the Colorado Rocky Mountains to assess SNODAS accuracy at...

Water is a limiting factor for plant growth and vegetation dynamics in alpine sandy land of the Tibetan Plateau, especially with the increasing frequency of extreme precipitation events and drought caused by climate change. Therefore, a relatively stable water source from either deeper soil profiles or ground water is necessary for plant growth. Understanding the water use strategy of dominant ...

Natural hazards and land management issues can benefit nowadays from the increasing availability of free, high-resolution satellite imagery that opens the way to fine scale detailed investigations. In high elevation catchments the analysis of vegetation dynamics deserves particular attention since little climatic modifications can be amplified in such fragile systems. For the same reasons, the ...

Phytoliths represent one of the few available altitudinal vegetation proxies for mountain ecosystems. This study analyzed 41 topsoil phytolith samples collected from five altitudinal zones in the southern Himalaya as far as, and beyond, the timberline, from tropical forest (up to 1,000 m a.s.l.) to subtropical forest (1,000-2,000 m a.s.l.), to temperate forest (2,000-3,000 m a.s.l.), to subalpi...

Holocene records of fire, vegetation, and climate were reconstructed from four sites in the Bitterroot Range region of the Northern Rocky Mountains in order to examine the vegetation and fire histories and evaluate the hypothesis proposed by Whitlock and Bartlein (1993) regarding the effects of increased summer insolation on precipitation patterns. Vegetation history in the series of sites was ...

Due to its diverse, wondrous plants and unique topography, Western China has drawn great attention from explorers and naturalists from the Western World. Among them, Ernest Henry Wilson (1876 -1930), known as 'Chinese' Wilson, travelled to Western China five times from 1899 to 1918. He took more than 1,000 photos during his travels. These valuable photos illustrated the natural and social envir...

Airborne laser scanning (ALS), often referred to as lidar or laser altimetry, is a remote sensing technique which was originally designed to measure the topography of the Earth’s surface. While the first commercially available airborne laser scanners recorded only the time of one backscattered pulse, state-of-the-art systems record several echoes for each emitted laser pulse. Thereby a 3D data ...

The GRASS system has been used to evaluate avalanche risk. This has been done by combining heterogeneous data. Val di Pejo, located in the north-western Trentino, an Italian alpine region which shows frequent and sometimes huge avalanche phenomena, has been selected as test area. A morphologic risk has been defined in those areas where the slope is between 28° and 55° for a minimum surface of a...

Vegetation phenology is considered a sensitive indicator of climate change, which controls carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles within terrestrial ecosystems. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is an important moderate resolution remote sensing data for monitoring vegetation phenology. However, Terra MODIS Collection 5 (C5) vege...