To address devastating land desertification and soil erosion and to improve human well-being, central government in China has implemented a number of ecological restoration programs. It is essential to rigorously monitor the dynamic of vegetation activity and evaluate the effectiveness of these programs, not only to provide scientific support for ecosystem monitoring in arid and semi-arid regio...

Climate warming affects permafrost soil carbon pools in two opposing ways: enhanced vegetation growth leads to higher carbon inputs to the soil, whereas permafrost melting accelerates decomposition and hence carbon release. Here, we study the spatial and temporal dynamics of these two processes under scenarios of climate change and evaluate their influence on the carbon balance of the permafros...

Vegetation affects water balance of the land surface by e.g. storage of precipitation water in the canopy and soil water extraction by transpiration. Therefore, it is essential to consider the role of vegetation in affecting water balance by taking into account the temporal dynamics of e.g. leaf area index, rooting depth and stomatal conductance in hydrological models. However until now, most c...

The Community Land Model (CLM3) Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (CLMDGVM) is used diagnostically to identify land and atmospheric model biases that lead to biases in the simulated vegetation. The CLM-DGVM driven with observed atmospheric data (offline simulation) underestimates global forest cover, overestimates grasslands, and underestimates global net primary production. These results are con...

A large number of vegetation indices have been developed and widely applied in terrestrial ecosystem research in the recent decades. However, a certain limitation was observed while applying these indices in research in dry areas due to their low sensitivity to low vegetation cover. In this context, the objectives of this study are to develop a new vegetation index, namely, the Generalized Diff...

Long-term measurements of ecological effects of warming are often not statistically significant because of annual variability or signal noise. These are reduced in indicators that filter or reduce the noise around the signal and allow effects of climate warming to emerge. In this way, certain indicators act as medium pass filters integrating the signal over years-to-decades. In the Alaskan Arct...

The great Pacific groups of atolls are such archipelagoes as the Tuamotus, Carolines, Marshalls, Gilberts, the Phoenix-Ellice group, and those scattered clusters and individual islands collectively termed the Pacific Equatorial or Line Islands. The observations forming the basis of this paper were made on visits to all these groups, except the Phoenix-Ellice and Gilberts, as well as to the Aust...

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN RETRACTED please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and Author. Data processing errors have resulted in misleading conclusions. The scientific community in King Saud University has serious concerns regarding the results and the article will be res...