Forests on calcareous substrates constitute a large fraction of the vegetation in Puerto Rico. Plant growth on these substrates may be affected by nutrient deficiencies, mainly P and Fe, resulting from high pH and formation of insoluble compounds of these elements. The occurrence of these forests in humid and dry areas provides an opportunity to compare nutrient relations, water use efficiency,...

In semiarid or arid conditions, the change of root-zone soil moisture can be almost instantaneously reflected by vegetation through biophysical process. This study investigated feasibility of mapping root-zone soil moisture using MODIS-derived NDVI via statistic approach at three sites (New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas) selected from the Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN). These three sites rep...

Influence of long-term changes in climate and CO2 concentration on intrinsic water-use efficiency (iWUE), defined as the ratio between net photosynthesis (A) and leaf conductance (g), and tree growth remain not fully revealed in humid subtropical China, which is distinct from other arid subtropical areas with dense coverage of broadleaf forests. This study presented the first tree-ring stable c...

Climate changes are predicted to increase extreme rainfall events in semiarid and arid region in Northern Hemisphere. Nutrient cycles will be affected by the precipitation changes but so far only very little is known how soil N transformations may respond. Here we investigated gross soil N transformation rates and their response to simulated rainfall events across Northeast China Transect (NECT...

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...

Biological diversity can be defined as variability among living organisms from all sources, including terrestrial organisms, marine and other aquatic ecosystems, and the ecological complexes which they are part of. This includes diversity within species, between species, and of ecosystems. Numerous diversity indices combine richness and evenness in a single expression, and several climate-based...

Many individual variables have been studied to understand climate change, yet an overall weather situation involves the consideration of many meteorological variables simultaneously at various times diurnally, seasonally, and yearly. The current study identifies a full weather situation as an air mass type using synoptic scale classification, in 30 population centres throughout Canada. Investig...

A multiproxy study of a 7 m long sedimentary sequence from Lake La Parra (39o 50.948’, 1o 52’, 1014 m a.s.l) supported by 11 C AMS and Pb/Cs dates provides a robust, high-resolution hydrological and environmental variability record for the last 1600 years of the Las Torcas sinkhole Complex in the Central Iberian Range. The succession of depositional environments in Lake La Parra sinkhole is con...

a r t i c l e i n f o Pollen records from Lake Malawi, Africa spanning the last 135 kyr show substantial and abrupt vegetation response to multiple episodes of extreme aridity between 135 and 75 ka. Peaks in both the relative abundance and total production of Podocarpus pollen define the first two of these drought episodes. From 135 to 127 and again from 117 to 105 kyr BP, Podocarpus percentage...