A coevolutionary perspective is adopted to understand the dynamics of exposure to mountain hazards in the European Alps. A spatially explicit, object-based temporal assessment of elements at risk to mountain hazards (river floods, torrential floods, and debris flows) in Austria and Switzerland is presented for the period from 1919 to 2012. The assessment is based on two different data sets: (1)...

We completed a shoreline survey of Phragmites occurrence and adjacent land use along more than 8,400 km of shoreline in the Maryland and Virginia portions of the Chesapeake Bay and its tidal tributaries. Phragmites occurred along 14.6% of Maryland estuarine shoreline in the mid-to-upper portion of Chesapeake Bay, but along only 2.0% of the surveyed Virginia shoreline in the mid-to-lower portion...

The objective of this study is to apply ENVISAT MERIS data in mapping mountain vegetation in Sweden. The Swedish mountain vegetation is characterized by mosaics of different land cover types; a single MERIS pixel (300 meter IFOV) can consist of several of these different land cover types. “Hard” classifications which produce a single thematic class per pixel often give a low accuracy. While man...

Quantifying and attributing the phenological changes in snow cover are essential for meteorological, hydrological, ecological, and societal implications. However, snow cover phenology changes have not been well documented. Evidence from multiple satellite and reanalysis data from 2001 to 2014 points out that the snow end date (De) advanced by 5.11 (±2.20) days in northern high latitudes (52-75°...

Orographically-induced gravity (buoyancy) waves can propagate through the tropopause to the stratosphere causing disruption to high altitude aircraft operations. High altitude turbulence (HAT) was first researched using U-2 aircraft in the mid-1960s and reported by Crooks (1965). He observed that HAT from mountain wave activity was more severe than turbulence associated with jet streams or conv...

The transport characteristics of phosphorus in soil and the assessment of its environmental risk have become hot topics in the environmental and agricultural fields. The Sanjiang Plain is an important grain production base in China, and it is characterised by serious land use change caused by large-scale agricultural exploitation. Agricultural inputs and tillage management have destroyed the so...

Our understanding of the evolution of primitive land plants is overviewed. Molecular phylogenetic data suggest that the suggested ancestor of the land plants is Charophyceae, although other ancestry is suggested based on different lines of evidence. Invasion to land environment during the mid-Ordovician or earlier should have been made possible by chemical compounds, ozone, flavonoid, cutin, sp...