BACKGROUND Although natural resources play a central role in rural livelihoods across the globe, little research has explored the relationship between migration and natural capital use, particularly in combination with other livelihood capitals (i.e., human, social, financial and physical). OBJECTIVE Grounded in the rural livelihood framework, this paper explores the association between the l...

Increasing evidence indicates that current dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) have suffered from insufficient realism and are difficult to improve, particularly because they are built on plant functional type (PFT) schemes. Therefore, new approaches, such as plant trait-based methods, are urgently needed to replace PFT schemes when predicting the distribution of vegetation and investigati...

Future climate change may significantly alter the distributions of many plant taxa. The effects of climate change may be particularly large in mountainous regions where climate can vary significantly with elevation. Understanding potential future vegetation changes in these regions requires methods that can resolve vegetation responses to climate change at fine spatial resolutions. We used LPJ,...

Land degradation in drylands is the process in which undesirable conditions emerge due to human and natural causes. Despite the particularly deleterious effects of degradation, and it’s potentially irreversible nature, regional assessments have provided conflicting extents, rates, and severities of degradation, both globally and regionally. Current monitoring of degradation relies upon the dete...

Whereas fossil evidence indicates extensive treeless vegetation and diverse grazing megafauna in Europe and northern Asia during the last glacial, experiments combining vegetation models and climate models have to-date simulated widespread persistence of trees. Resolving this conflict is key to understanding both last glacial ecosystems and extinction of most of the mega-herbivores. Using a dyn...

The feasibility of using vegetation greennessmetrics as a proxy for transpiration variability overAustralia is demonstrated. Several global evapotranspiration datasets, one of which provides transpiration data and is constructed independently of the vegetation greenness measurements, are compared to four satellite-based observations representative of the state of the vegetation over several reg...

In May 1999 the SMOS Earth Explorer Opportunity mission was selected by ESA to provide global soil moisture and sea salinity maps using the MIRAS L-band aperture synthesis interferometric radiometer. At this frequency there is a high dynamic range of the soil moisture signature and surface roughness effects are small, as well as vegetation effects. However, they cannot be neglected at large obs...