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...

[1] The fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation, fAPAR, is an important biophysical characteristic in models of gas exchange between the terrestrial boundary layer and the atmosphere, as well as in the analysis of vegetation productivity. Synoptic estimation of fAPAR has been performed by using NDVI as a linear proxy of fAPAR, despite the saturation of NDVI at fAPAR beyond 0.7....

In recent decades, investigations of NPP (net primary production) or proxies here of (normalized difference vegetation index, NDVI) and land degradation in Sahelian West Africa have yielded inconsistent and sometimes contradicting results. Large-scale, long-term investigations using remote sensing have shown greening and an increase in NPP in locations and periods where specific, small scale fi...

Since the 1970s, acid rain has remained in the public spotlight in both Europe and the United States and recently has emerged as an important problem in other regions such as Southeast Asia. To reveal responses of Masson Pine to acid rain during a long time series in central China, we used the interpolation dataset of acid rain and the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) norma...

A vegetation cover increase has been identified at global scales using satellite images and vegetation indices. This fact is usually explained by global climatic change processes such as CO(2) and temperature increases. Nevertheless, although these causes can be important, the role of socioeconomic transformations must be considered in some places, since in several areas of Northern Hemisphere ...

Within the context of climate change, it is of utmost importance to quantify the stability of ecosystems with respect to climate anomalies. It is well acknowledged that ecosystem stability may change over time. As these temporal stability changes may provide a warning for increased vulnerability of the system, this study provides a methodology to quantify and assess these temporal changes in ve...

Upscaling ecological information to larger scales in space and downscaling remote sensing observations or model simulations to finer scales remain grand challenges in Earth system science. Downscaling often involves inferring subgrid information from coarse-scale data, and such ill-posed problems are classically addressed using regularization. Here, we apply two-dimensional Tikhonov Regularizat...

This paper evaluated the capacity of SPOT VEGETATION time-series to monitor herbaceous fuel moisture content (FMC) in order to improve fire risk assessment in the savanna ecosystem of Kruger National Park in South Africa. In situ herbaceous FMC data were used to assess the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Vegetation Dryness Index (VDI), Im...

The Normalized Di erence Vegetation Index (NDVI) is widely accepted as a good indicator for providing vegetation properties and associated changes for large scale geographic regions. Using multivariate time series data analysis methods based on Principal Component transform and Wavelet Decomposition, a sequence of 11-year monthly Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR)-derived NDVI dat...

Global change affects vegetation cover and processes through multiple pathways. Long 1 time series of surface land surface properties derived from satellite remote sensing give unique 2 abilities to observe these changes, particularly in areas with complex topography and limited research 3 infrastructure. Here, we focus on Nepal, a biodiversity hotspot where vegetation productivity is 4 limited...