The use of pollen records to document vegetation responses to climatic change in mountains relies on the ability of pollen assemblages to differentiate among elevationally stratified vegetation zones. Comparisons among modern pollen assemblages within mountainous areas provide a basis for assessing this potential. We examined relationships between pollen assemblages, forest vegetation and clima...

Vegetation plays a key role in reducing ambient temperature, moisture and pollutant capture, energy use and subsequent ground level ozone reduction. In recent years vegetation mapping has become increasingly important, especially with advancements in environmental economic valuation. The spatial information from the remote sensing satellites enables researchers to quantify and qualify the amoun...

Factors that may account for subarctic vegetation patterns that are not reconcilable with synoptic climate were sought by reference to data on local climate, soils, parent materials, vegetation, and topography. Where the forest-tundra lies climatically northward, the vegetation transition zone is relatively narrow, and the soils are nutrient-rich, fine-textured loamy Cryosols derived from sedim...

As landmass of the world is covered by vegetation, taking into account phenology when performing land cover classification may yield more accurate maps. The availability of no-cost Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) NDVI dataset that provides high-quality continuous time series data is representing a potentially significant source of land cover information especially for detection...

Vegetation can play a major role in the hydrologic ecosystem service tradeoffs resulting from land use change: by affecting the volume of rain water that reaches the ground surface, vegetation affects water supply. But because canopy interception of rainfall is affected in complex and competing ways by forest structure and ambient weather conditions, both of which vary at small and large scales...

The lower montane zone of northwestern Ecuador, like many parts of the tropics, is undergoing rapid conversion from native forest vegetation to crop and pastureland. The current landscape is a mosaic of agricultural land, forest fragments and secondgrowth vegetation in various stages of development. While there is abundant research documenting the e€ects of land-use change in the lowland tropic...

Planting trees on the right sites is the first principle in silviculture, but it is not easy to apply at a large scale, especially in complex terrain such as mountainous regions. In hilly and gully landscapes of China’s Loess Plateau, the environmental heterogeneity is so great that it is very difficult to choose the right sites for planting trees. The long history of vegetation destruction mak...

[1] In this paper, we use growing season Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) as an indicator of plant growth to quantify the relationships between vegetation production and intra-annual precipitation patterns for three major temperate biomes in China: grassland, deciduous broadleaf forest, and deciduous coniferous forest. With increased precipitation, NDVI of grassland and deciduous b...

In this study we characterized spatial heterogeneity of soil carbon and nitrogen pools, soil moisture, and soil pH of the first 15 cm of the soil profile; depth of the organic horizon; forest floor covers; and understory vegetation abundances in three sites (1999, 1987 and 1920 wildfires) of a boreal forest chronosequence of interior Alaska. We also investigated the cross-dependence between und...

Aim To detect possible expansion of boreal forest stands in response to recent warming. Previous modelling studies have concluded that major shifts in vegetation patterns, including changes in boreal forest extent, could arise during the next two centuries under global warming scenarios. However, ®eld investigations of tree stands at ecotones have so far revealed little indication of stand resp...