We assessed the effect that varying patterns of biomass allocation had on growth of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) growing in the desert climate of the Great Basin and the montane climate of the eastern Sierra Nevada. Prior work established that desert trees have lower leaf: sapwood area ratios than montane trees (0.104 and 0.201 M2/ cm2, respectively) and proportionally greater stem respirat...

introduction with increasing development of urban communities and increase of population in towns, thus the need for water is also increased in the recent years. production rate of municipal wastewater has also grown dramatically. on the other hand, increase of public awareness about the water pollution problems has followed the new and stricter environmental laws concerning wastewater discharg...

Alpine steppe is considered to be the largest grassland type on the Tibetan Plateau. This grassland contributes to the global carbon cycle and is sensitive to climate changes. The allocation of biomass in an ecosystem affects plant growth and the overall functioning of the ecosystem. However, the mechanism by which plant biomass is allocated on the alpine steppe remains unclear. In this study, ...

[1] Surface soils hold the largest terrestrial organic carbon pool, although estimates of the world’s soil organic carbon storage remain controversial, largely due to spatial data gaps or insufficient data density. In this study, spatial distribution and storage of soil organic carbon in China are estimated using the published data from 34,411 soil profiles investigated during China’s second na...

The hypothesis that rainfall might be a case of self-organized critical dynamics is tested using long-term data sets from weather stations around the world. It is found that the distribution of droughts in semi-arid regions obeys indeed a clear-cut power law. The statistics for rain intensity, on the other hand, exhibits two distinct scaling regimes. c ©1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights res...

Animal species are seldom distributed evenly at either local or larger spatial scales, and instead tend to aggregate in sites that meet their resource requirements and maximise fitness. This tendency is likely to be especially marked in arid regions where species could be expected to concentrate at resource-rich oases. In this study, we first test the hypothesis that productive riparian sites i...

The understanding of airborne pollen transportation is crucial for the reconstruction of the paleoenvironment. Under favorable conditions, a considerable amount of long-distance-transported pollen can be deposited far from its place of origin. In extreme arid regions, in most cases, such situations occur and increase the difficulty to interpret fossil pollen records. In this study, three sets o...

The adaptive significance of mechanisms of energy and water conservation among species of desert rodents, which avoid temperature extremes by remaining within a burrow during the day, is well established. Conventional wisdom holds that arid-zone birds, diurnal organisms that endure the brunt of their environment, occupy these desert climates because of the possession of physiological design fea...

The frequency of Santa Ana wind events is investigated within a high-resolution downscaling of the ERA40 Reanalysis to 6-km resolution over Southern California. In this climate reconstruction, the number of Santa Ana days per winter season declines significantly over the 44-year reanalysis period, resulting in over 30% fewer events per year over the final decade of the reconstruction (1991–2001...

Recent regional climate-change models indicated significant changes in the temporal and spatial distribution of rainfall in the Mediterranean-Basin region. Understanding the consequences of rainfall alterations for soil respiration and carbon processing in these regions is essential, considering their crucial functions for soil fertility and ecosystem functioning. Our aim was to evaluate the ef...