This review summarizes recent research in Australia on: (i) climate and geophysical trends over the last few decades; (ii) projections for climate change in the 21st century; (iii) predicted impacts from modelling studies on particular ecosystems and native species; and (iv) ecological effects that have apparently occurred as a response to recent warming. Consistent with global trends, Australi...

Among seasonal practices that affect grape quality, selective leaf removal at the cluster zone is accepted as a powerful technique to manipulate flavonoid content of grapes and wines. However, most of research on fruit-zone defoliation has been conducted under temperate climate and it remains uncertain if cluster exposure would be a recommendable practice in semiarid viticultural areas. In this...

Nitrogen (N) is, after water, the most limiting resource in semiarid ecosystems. However, knowledge on the N cycling ability of semiarid woody plants is still very rudimentary. This study analyzed the seasonal change in the N concentrations and pools of the leaves and woody organs of two species of semiarid sub-shrubs with contrasting leaf habit. The ability of both species to uptake, remobiliz...

Two methods are presented of estimating accumulated sediment yield stemming from erosion in a semiarid climate during a given time span, and the methods are compared from the viewpoint of the economic consequences evaluated within a Bayesian framework. The design of reservoirs requires the estimation of the random sediment volume Z accumulated over the lifetime of the project. An analytic and a...

Biochar amendments to soil have potential as a climate change mitigation strategy. However, their effect on carbon exchange in different ecosystems has not been well evaluated. Understanding how biochar affects carbon exchange from agricultural soil is essential for clarifying the contribution of biochar management to the carbon budget. We performed a laboratory and a two-year field experiment ...

The complementary relationship (CR) of evapotranspiration allows the estimation of the actual evapotranspiration rate (ETa) of the land surface using only routine meteorological data, which is of great importance in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) due to its sparse observation network. With the highest in situ automatic climate observation system in a typical semiarid alpine steppe region of the TP, t...

Accurate estimation of latent heat flux (LE) is critical in characterizing semiarid ecosystems. Many LE algorithms have been developed during the past few decades. However, the algorithms have not been directly compared, particularly over global semiarid ecosystems. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of five LE models over semiarid ecosystems such as grassland, shrub, and savanna using...