Green plants play an important role in matter and energy transformations and are key messengers in the carbon and energy cycle. Vegetation net primary productivity (NPP) reflects the capability of plants to convert solar energy into photosynthate (fixed carbon). It can be used as a direct indicator of current status and future trend of ecological processes affected by human activities and clima...

There is potential for synergy between the global environmental conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification: changes in land management and land use undertaken to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions can simultaneously deliver positive outcomes for conservation of biodiversity, and mitigation of desertification and land degradation. However, while there can be complementariti...

Nepal’s terrain is dissected by many rivers and streams to form a complex of watersheds. Natural and human-induced processes operate on these watersheds. The main processes that lead to the degradation of watersheds are landslides, soil erosion, floods, biodiversity loss, and unsustainable water extraction and farming practices. These lead to the loss of soil fertility, the depletion of water t...

Drylands cover 40 to 45% of the earth’s land surface and harbour about 38% of people on the planet. The UN has claimed that up to 70% of drylands suffer from desertification, affecting 168 countries globally. This has led to desertification becoming the first globally defined environmental issue. Much has been written about problems with the idea of desertification and how it became such a powe...

Advances in wireless transmission and increasing quantity of GPS in vehicles flood us with massive amount of trajectory data. The large amounts of trajectories imply considerable quantity of interesting road condition that current traffic database lacks. Mining live traffic condition from trajectories is a challenge due to complexity of road network model, uncertainty of driving behavior as wel...

Over many decades our understanding of the impacts of intermittent drought in water-limited environments like the West African Sahel has been influenced by a narrative of overgrazing and human-induced desertification. The desertification narrative has persisted in both scientific and popular conception, such that recent regional-scale recovery ("regreening") and local success stories (community...