Ecosystem responses to climate change can exert positive or negative feedbacks on climate, mediated in part by slow-moving factors such as shifts in vegetation community composition. Long-term experimental manipulations can be used to examine such ecosystem responses, but they also present another opportunity: inferring the extent to which contemporary climate change is responsible for slow cha...

In this Appendix, we summarize some basic properties of the three classes of functional diversity measures: (1) functional Hill number ) (Q D q which quantifies the effective number of equally abundant and equally distinct species in an assemblage with a constant species pairwise distance Q, where Q denotes Rao’s quadratic entropy; (2) mean functional diversity MD(Q) = Q Q D q × )] ( [ which qu...

Abstract Background Climate change is expected to increase fire activity across the circumboreal zone, including central Siberia. However, few studies have quantitatively assessed potential changes in regime characteristics, or considered possible spatial variation magnitude of change. Moreover, while simulations indicate that climate are likely drive major shifts Siberian vegetation, knowledge...

Erosion on military lands limits Army training activities, and may cause environmental problems both at training sites and downstream. Thus, remedial soil and land conservation plans are vitally important to stabilize erosion and use the land more safely for Army activities while complying with environmental regulations and standards. The channel-hillslope integrated landscape development (CHIL...

Discussions This discussion paper is/has been under review for the journal Earth System Dynamics (ESD). Please refer to the corresponding final paper in ESD if available. Abstract Multiple states of woody cover under similar climate conditions are found in both conceptual models and observations. Due to the limitation of the observed woody cover data set, it is unclear whether the observed bimo...

[1] A simple model is developed to describe the significant land-atmosphere interaction processes in the warm climate. It includes bulk soil hydrology, dynamic vegetation, and simple land-atmosphere interaction processes. The model can simulate the basic features of land surface control on evapotranspiration (ET) and exhibits a multiequilibrium behavior similar to that of some more complex mode...

The first results of the UVic Earth System Model coupled to a land surface scheme and a dynamic global vegetation model are presented in this study. In the first part the present day climate simulation is discussed and compared to observations. We then compare a simulation of an ice age inception (forced with 116 ka BP orbital parameters and an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 240 ppm) with a p...