Terrestrial vegetation dynamics are closely influenced by both climate and by both climate and by land use and/or land cover change (LULCC) caused by human activities. Both can change over time in a monotonic way and it can be difficult to separate the effects of climate change from LULCC on vegetation. Here we attempt to attribute trends in the fractional green vegetation cover to climate vari...

Deforestation/land-use changes are major drivers of regional climate change in central South America, impacting upon Amazonia and Gran Chaco ecoregions. Most experimental and modeling studies have focused on the resulting perturbations within Amazonia. Using the Regional Climate Model PRECIS, driven by ERA-40 reanalysis and ECHAM4 Baseline model for the period 1961-2000 (40-year runs), potentia...

Global change will likely affect savanna and forest structure and distributions, with implications for diversity within both biomes. Few studies have examined the impacts of both expected precipitation and land use changes on vegetation structure in the future, despite their likely severity. Here, we modeled tree cover in sub-Saharan Africa, as a proxy for vegetation structure and land cover ch...

Of all recurring natural disasters, long-term drought is one of the most devastating and costly due to large spatial extent and often long duration. The mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of long-term droughts are not well understood, however many drought analyses allege the importance of land-atmosphere feedbacks and speculate that these feedbacks will amplify changes in the hydrologic...

Quantifying the isolated and integrated impacts of land use (LU) and climate change on streamflow is challenging as well as crucial to optimally manage water resources in river basins. This paper presents a simple hydrologic modeling-based approach to segregate the impacts of land use and climate change on the streamflow of a river basin. The upper Ganga basin (UGB) in India is selected as the ...

As global change induces more and more extreme climate events (Field et al., 2012), temporal variability in precipitation is likely becoming larger than ever. How land ecosystems respond to the stronger temporal variability in precipitation is a new frontier research area for ecologists (Reichstein et al., 2013; Niu et al., 2014). In this issue of New Phytologist Knapp et al. (pp. 41–47) frame ...

Precipitation extremes increase in intensity over many regions of the globe in simulations of a warming climate1–3. The rate of increase of precipitation extremes in the extratropics is consistent across global climate models, but the rate of increase in the tropics varies widely, depending on the model used3. The behaviour of tropical precipitation can, however, be constrained by observations ...

Title of Dissertation / Thesis: THE JOINT EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND URBANIZATION ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF STREAMFLOW MAGNITUDES IN THE MARYLAND PIEDMONT REGION Mohamad Issa Hejazi, Master of Science, 2004 Dissertation / Thesis Directed By: Associate Professor, Glenn E. Moglen, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering This thesis examines the effect of climate and land use change on s...

ERA-Interim/Land is a global land surface reanalysis data set covering the period 1979–2010. It describes the evolution of soil moisture, soil temperature and snowpack. ERA-Interim/Land is the result of a single 32-year simulation with the latest ECMWF (European Centre for MediumRange Weather Forecasts) land surface model driven by meteorological forcing from the ERA-Interim atmospheric reanaly...

[1] We investigated the impacts of vegetation and groundwater dynamics on warm season precipitation by using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model coupled with a modified Noah land surface model (LSM). The modified Noah LSM was augmented with an interactive canopy model and a simple groundwater model (SIMGM). A series of experiments performed shows that incorporating vegetation and g...