This paper argues that the interplay of water, carbon and vegetation dynamics fundamentally links some global trends in the current and conceivable future Anthropocene, such as cropland expansion, freshwater use, and climate change and its impacts. Based on a review of recent literature including geographically explicit simulation studies with the process-based LPJmL global biosphere model, it ...

1. Numerous plant traits are known to influence aspects of individual performance, including rates of carbon uptake, tissue turnover, mortality and fecundity. These traits are bound to influence emergent properties of vegetation because quantities such as leaf-area cover, average height, primary productivity and density of standing biomass result from the collective behaviour of individuals. Ye...

Migration is one of the major socio-economic characteristics of China since the country adopted the policy of economic reform in late 1970s. Many studies have been dedicated to understand why and how people move, and the consequences of their welfare. The purpose of this study is to investigate the environmental impacts of the large scale movement of population in China. We analyzed the trend i...

Availability of food may play a number of different dynamical roles in rodent–vegetation systems. Consideration of a suite of rodent–vegetation models, ranging from very simple ones to a model of medium complexity tailored to a specific system (brown lemmings at Point Barrow, Alaska, USA), suggested several general principles. If vegetation grows logistically following an herbivory event (a sta...

The contribution of understorey vegetation (UVEG) to forest ecosystem biomass and carbon (C) across diverse forest types has, to date, eluded quantification at regional and national scales. Efforts to quantify UVEG C have been limited to field-intensive studies or broad-scale modelling approaches lacking field measurements. Although large-scale inventories of UVEG C are not common, speciesand c...

It has been shown that vegetation growth in semiarid regions is important to the global terrestrial CO2 sink, which indicates the strong need for improved understanding and spatially explicit estimates of CO2 uptake (gross primary production; GPP) in semi-arid ecosystems. This study has three aims: (1) to evaluate the MOD17A2H GPP (collection 6) product against GPP based on eddy covariance (EC)...

A magnificent repository of Late Pleistocene terrestrial megafauna fossils is contained in ice-rich loess deposits of Alaska and Yukon, collectively eastern Beringia. The stable carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) isotope compositions of bone collagen from these fossils are routinely used to determine paleodiet and reconstruct the paleoecosystem. This approach requires consideration of changes in...

The description of soil moisture dynamics is a challenging problem for the hydrological community, as it is governed by complex interactions between climate, soil and vegetation. Recent research has achieved significant advances in the description of temporal dynamics of soil water balance through the use of a stochastic differential equation proposed by Laio et al. (2001). The assumptions of t...

Models applied for simulating the impact of climate change on large scale vegetation dynamics generally face the trade-off between computational expenses (computation time and memory) and modelled detail. Global models often abstract from processes entailing spatial linkages, e.g. species migration, and have too coarse resolutions to depictfrom processes entailing spatial linkages, e.g. species...

Dissertation title: EFFECTS OF ANNUAL AND PERENNIAL COMMUNITY DYNAMICS ON TIDAL FRESHWATER MARSH ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONING Kristine Noel Hopfensperger, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Katharina A.M. Engelhardt Dr. Sujay S. Kaushal Program of Marine, Estuarine, Environmental Science Tidal freshwater marshes are complex systems with many linkages between the physical, chemica...