The Loess Plateau region of northwestern China has unique geological and dry/semi-dry climate characteristics. However, knowledge about ectomycorrhizal fungal (EMF) communities in the Loess Plateau is limited. In this study, we investigated EMF communities in Populus simonii and Pinus tabuliformis patches within the forest-steppe zone, in pine forests within the forest zone, and the transitiona...

Evapotranspiration (ET) plays a significant role in regional and global climates through its partitioning in hydrological cycles, and its estimation is thus of a great importance in assessing ground water and surface water resources, predicting crop yield and planning land use. For experimenting the possibility to assess the hydrological responses of ecological restoration in the Western Chines...

The red-clay sequence on the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP) was deposited during the late Miocene-Pliocene and is encoded with important information of past climate changes. However, it has received much less study in comparison to the overlying Pleistocene loess-paleosol sequence. In this paper, we review recent progress in characterizing the environmental magnetic parameter-based paleoclimate hi...

With a vast area of marginal land, the Loess Plateau of China is a promising region for large-scale production of second-generation energy crops. However, it remains unknown whether such production is sustainable in the long run, especially under climate change. Using a regional climate change model, PRECIS, we analyzed the impact of climate change on Miscanthus production in the Loess Plateau....

Retardation of tritium migration in the Chinese loess media was studied through column experiments by comparison of the migration velocity with other three “non-adsorptive” tracers of Br, Tc, and I. Results showed that the transport peak of Br was 1.25 times earlier than that of tritium when the tracers were simultaneously injected into the column, and the migration of Tc was even 1.60 times fa...

Predicting the probability of the occurrence of a binary outcome or condition is important in biomedical research. While assessing discrimination is an essential issue in developing and validating binary prediction models, less attention has been paid to methods for assessing model calibration. Calibration refers to the degree of agreement between observed and predicted probabilities and is oft...

We present an analysis of the impacts of weather change and large-scale vegetation conservation programs on the vegetation dynamics in China’s Loess Plateau from 2000 through 2009. We employed a multiple lines of evidence approach in which multi-scale data were used. We employed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data, acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MO...

BACKGROUND Adequate normalization minimizes the effects of systematic technical variations and is a prerequisite for getting meaningful biological changes. However, there is inconsistency about miRNA normalization performances and recommendations. Thus, we investigated the impact of seven different normalization methods (reference gene index, global geometric mean, quantile, invariant selection...

A 45 m outcrop of Quaternary sediments on Birch Creek, near Circle, Alaska, reveals a record of #uctuating environmental conditions that probably spans several glacial}interglacial cycles. From base to top the deposits are forested #oodplain (warm), colluvium with ice wedges (cold), forest soil (warm), loess (cold), paleosol containing Old Crow Tephra (OCt) (cool-to-warm), loess (cold), lacustr...