As climate change is expected to have a significant impact on species distributions, there is an urgent challenge to provide reliable information to guide conservation biodiversity policies. In addressing this challenge, we propose a remote sensing-based approach to forecast the future habitat quality for European badger, a species not abundant and at risk of local extinction in the arid enviro...

Land degradation impacts on several critical environmental issues such as food security, diminishing quality and quantity of fresh water resources, preservation of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, and global climate change. Land degradation is responsible for soil erosion and can eventually lead to desertification. The International Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD) defines des...

Knowledge about the long-term influences of climate change on the amount of potential carbon (C) sequestration in forest ecosystems, including age-related dynamics, remains unclear. This study used two similar age-sequences of black locust forests (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) in the semi-arid and semi-humid zones of China's Loess Plateau to assess the variation in C stocks and age-related dynamics...

Episodic recharge as a result of infrequent, high intensity precipitation events comprises the bulk of groundwater recharge in arid environments. Climate change and shifts in precipitation intensity will affect groundwater continuity, thus altering groundwater recharge. This study aims to identify changes in the ratio of groundwater recharge and precipitation, the R:P ratio, in the arid southwe...

Monthly mean air temperature and precipitation data, monthly dust storm frequencies (times of dust storm occurrences) of 107 stations in North China were analyzed to clarify the relationship between the climate change and dust storm occurrence. Arid regions of North China were divided into five and trends of dust storm occurrence and climate changes showed different patterns for these regions, ...

It has been suggested that climates during the Holocene have varied on timescales of about 1500 years, forced by oscillations of a solar cycle. These climatic changes have been implicated as the cause of changes in geological records from, mostly, marine sediments. If there were such changes, and if they were of great enough amplitude to force changes in marine sedimentation, it would be reason...

Tracking the presence, distribution and disappearance of biological soil crusts is important for ecosystem management of desert regions and provides highly valuable information on desertification and climate change studies in arid environments. Based on the analysis of the spectral features of biological soil crusts, we propose a new biological soil crust index (BSCI) for biological soil crusts...

Estimation of wind erosion rates of Mongolian Plateau by using 137Cs tracing technique. Wind erosion is one of the major environmental problems in semi-arid and arid regions. Here we established a transect from northwest (Tariat, Mongolia) to southeast (Xilingol, Inner Mongolia of China) across the Mongolian Plateau, and selected eight sampling sites along the transect. We then estimated the so...

regional impact studies of the future climate change effects are necessary because projected changes in meteorological variables differ from one region to another, and different climate systems can react in varied ways to the same changes. in this study, the effects of climate change on bioclimatic deficiency were compared in two cultivation methods (irrigated and rainfed) in a semi-arid region...

As commonly defined, the tropics comprise that region of the earth lying between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, constituting 38% of the larid surface (5 x 109 ha). The tropics may also be defined as those areas with mean temperatures greater than 18'C in all mor.ths of th. year. A third definition of the tropics specifies those areas with soils in which the tempera­ ture at a depth of 50 ...