Arctic ecosystems have been afflicted by vast changes in recent decades. Changes in temperature, as well as precipitation, are having an impact on snow cover, vegetation productivity and coverage, vegetation seasonality, surface albedo, and permafrost dynamics. The coupled climate-vegetation change in the arctic is thought to be a positive feedback in the Earth system, which can potentially fur...

18.2.1 Model Development within SDGVM The primary Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) for estimating that we are making use of for flux estimation is the Sheffield DGVM (SDGVM). This year’s major SDGVM model developments have been concerned with tracing the dynamics of individual functional type cohorts and a completely new representation of root and soil carbon dynamics. Of particular relev...

Dry forests represent a large percentage of tropical forests and are vulnerable to both anthropogenic and natural disturbances, yet important aspects of their sensitivity to disruption remain poorly understood. It is particularly unclear how changes in land-use or tropical storm patterns may affect the resiliency of phosphorus (P)-limited neotropical forests. In these systems, vegetation is sus...

Accurate and up-to-date mapping and monitoring of rubber plantations is challenging. In this study, we presented a simple method for rapidly and accurately mapping rubber plantations in the Xishuangbanna region of southwest China using phenology-based vegetation index differencing. Temporal profiles of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Atmospher...

Assessing biomass dynamics is highly critical for monitoring ecosystem balance and its response to climate change and anthropogenic activities. In this study, we introduced a direct link between Landsat vegetation spectral indices and ground/airborne LiDAR data; this integration was established to estimate the biomass dynamics over various years using multi-temporal Landsat satellite images. Ou...

Phenology, or the seasonality of recurring biological events such as vegetation canopy http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005JD006588.shtml (1 of 2)9/1/2006 9:19:03 AM Evaluation of the SeaWinds scatterometer for regional monitoring of vegetation phenology development and senescence, is a primary constraint on global carbon, water and energy cycles. We analyzed multiseason Ku-band radar bac...

[1] Regular vegetation patterns in semiarid ecosystems are believed to arise from the interplay between long-range competition and facilitation processes acting at smaller distances. We show that, under rather general conditions, longrange competition alone may be enough to shape these patterns. To this end we propose a simple, general model for the dynamics of vegetation, which includes only l...

Climate change and the widespread alteration of natural habitats are major drivers of vegetation change in drylands. In the Chihuahuan Desert, large areas of grasslands dominated by perennial grass species have transitioned over the last 150 years to shrublands dominated by woody species, accompanied by accelerated water and wind erosion. Multiple mechanisms drive the shrub-encroachment process...

Understanding how desertification takes place in different ecosystems is an important step in attempting to forecast and prevent such transitions. Dryland ecosystems often exhibit patchy vegetation, which has been shown to be an important factor on the possible regime shifts that occur in arid regions in several model studies. In particular, both gradual shifts that occur by front propagation, ...