Semi-arid ecosystems are key contributors to the global carbon cycle and may even dominate the inter-annual variability (IAV) and trends of the land carbon sink, driven largely by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The linkages between dynamics of semi-arid ecosystems and climate at the hemispheric scale however are not well known. Here, we use satellite data and climate observations from...

Previous studies have concluded that the increase in vegetation in the arid northwest of China is related to precipitation rather than temperature. However, these studies neglected the effects of climate warming on water availability that arise through changes in the melting characteristics of this snowy and glaciated region. Here, we characterized vegetation changes using the newly improved th...

the arid zone encompasses land that has an imbalance between precipitation and losses through evaporation. globally, arid zones comprise large part of many countries in the mid-latitudes in both the northern and the southern hemispheres. both australia and iran are countries with a large arid zone. this negative water balance in the arid zone affects the type of land use in these countries. at ...

a major part of the rangelands of iran are located in arid and semi-arid regions. in this climate, rainfall fluctuation is an important factor which affects vegetation and forage production. in dry years that rainfall decreases, surface vegetation and forage production is damaged. this study was conducted on semi-steppic rangelands of ardebil over nine years (1999-2007), to study of vegetation ...

Water managers need map of irrigated areas (defined as the identification of their location and their areal extent) to plan a rational use of water under limited availability and to prevent the unauthorized withdrawals. Many authors have shown that the Earth Observation techniques are an effective tool for mapping irrigated areas worldwide at different spatial scales (global/regional/and local)...

The paper reports a technique used to construct a reference time series for the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically-active radiation (FAPAR) based on remotely-sensed data in the largest Russian arid wetland territory. For the arid Volga-Akhtuba wetlands, FAPAR appears to be an informative spectral index for estimating plant cover health and its seasonal and annual dynamics. Since FAPAR algo...

Caragana, with distinctive variation in leaf and rachis characters, exhibits three centers of geographic distribution, i.e., Central Asia, the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP), and East Asia, corresponding to distinct biomes. Because Caragana species are often ecologically dominant components of the vegetation in these regions, it is regarded as a key taxon for the study of floristic evolution in ...

In the Galápagos Islands climate and food abundance vary strongly among vegetation zones and between seasons. We studied the foraging behavior of four mainly insectivorous Darwin’s finch species on Santa Cruz Island. We compared foraging behavior between (1) the arid zone, where food is scarce, with the humid Scalesia zone, where food is abundant; and (2) within each zone between dry and wet se...