After decades of research, we are starting to understand more about why the number of species varies from place to place on the planet. However, little is known about spatial variation in abundance, especially for soil-dwelling organisms. In this study, we aimed to disentangle the relative influences of climatic factors, soil properties, and plant diversity on the abundance of soil-dwelling inv...

The depth to carbonate nodular (Bk) horizon in soils (D in cm) is correlated with mean annual precipitation (P in mm), so that Bk horizons are deep in subhumid regions, but shallow in semiarid regions. Previous quantifications of this relationship are unchanged by this new compilation of 807 soils: P 5 137.24 1 6.45D 1 0.013D2, where R2 5 0.52, and standard error (S.E.) 5 6147 mm. In most North...

Understanding how the dynamics of vegetation growth respond to climate change at different temporal and spatial scales is critical to projecting future ecosystem dynamics and the adaptation of ecosystems to global change. In this study, we investigated vegetated growth dynamics (annual productivity, seasonality and the minimum amount of vegetated cover) in China and their relations with climati...

Monthly evapotranspiration (ET) rates (2000 to 2009) across Nebraska at about 1-km resolution were obtained by linear transformations of the MODIS (MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) daytime surface temperature values with the help of the Priestley-Taylor equation and the complementary relationship of evaporation. For positive values of the mean annual precipitation and ET differenc...

Changes in precipitation could have crucial influences on the regional water resources in arid regions such as Xinjiang. It is necessary to understand the intrinsic multi-scale variations of precipitation in different parts of Xinjiang in the context of climate change. In this study, based on precipitation data from 53 meteorological stations in Xinjiang during 1960-2012, we investigated the in...

This study investigates the skill of linear methods for downscaling provincial-scale precipitation over Indonesia from fields that describe the large-scale circulation and hydrological cycle. The study is motivated by the strong link between large-scale variations in the monsoon and the El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon and regional precipitation, and the subsequent impact of reg...

As an important forcing data for hydrologic models, precipitation has significant effects on model simulation. The China Meteorological Forcing Dataset (ITP) and Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) precipitation data are the two commonly used data sources in the Heihe River Basin (HRB). This paper focused on evaluating the accuracy of these two precipitation datasets. A set of metrics ...

Although it has been documented that daily precipitation extremes are increasing worldwide, faster increases may be expected for subdaily extremes. Here after a careful quality control procedure, we compared trends in hourly and daily precipitation extremes using a large network of stations across the United States (U.S.) within the 1950–2011 period. A greater number of significant increasing t...