Knowledge of how rainfall seasonality affects land surface phenology has important implications on understanding ecosystem resilience to future climate change in the Congo Basin. We studied the impacts of land cover on the response of the canopy greenness cycle (CGC) to the rainy season in the Congo Basin on a yearly basis during 2006–2013. Specifically, we retrieved CGC from the time series of...

BACKGROUND A functional forest carbon measuring, reporting and verification (MRV) system to support climate change mitigation policies, such as REDD+, requires estimates of forest biomass carbon, as an input to estimate emissions. A combination of field inventory and remote sensing is expected to provide those data. By linking Landsat 8 and forest inventory data, we (1) developed linear mixed e...

The key to simulating soil erosion is to calculate the vegetation cover (C) factor. Methods that apply remote sensing to calculate C factor at regional scale cannot directly use the C factor formula. That is because the C factor formula is obtained by experiment, and needs the coverage ratio data of croplands, woodlands and grasslands at standard plot scale. In this paper, we present a C factor...

Dendroecological methods for quantifying and dating historical canopy disturbance events have been widely applied for temperate forests, but may not be useful for semi-arid woodlands, where growth is more strongly influenced by drought cycles. Our study focuses on the potential utility of dendroecological methods for reconstructing historical fire in woodlands of the Nevada Great Basin, USA, wh...

Mountains, ocean currents, forests, and swamps have played an important role in regulating global climate for hundreds of millions of years, but the truly novel event of the Cenozoic was the evolution and expansion of grasslands, with their uniquely coevolved grasses and grazers. Neogene expansion of the climatic and geographic range of grasslands at the expense of woodlands is now revealed by ...

Soils are the largest terrestrial carbon store and soil respiration is the second-largest flux in ecosystem carbon cycling. Across China's temperate region, climatic changes and human activities have frequently caused the transformation of grasslands to woodlands. However, the effect of this transition on soil respiration and soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics remains uncertain in this area. In...

Green world: The presence of decaying trees in primeval and unmanaged woodlands is an important factor in supporting biodiversity. (Photo: Ralf Lotys/Wikipedia.) After the end of the last glacial period around 11,700 years ago, forests took over most of Europe, replacing the tundra and steppe and reconquering the land that had been covered by glaciers. Over the last three millennia, Europeans h...