Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is generally recognized as a good indicator of terrestrial vegetation productivity. Understanding climatic influences, in particular precipitation and temperature, on NDVI enables prediction of productivity changes under different climatic scenarios. We examined temporal responses of remotely sensed NDVI to precipitation and temperature during a nin...

Uncertainty about responses of vegetation index, aboveground biomass (AGB) and gross primary production (GPP) limits our ability to predict how climatic warming will influence plant growth in alpine regions. A field warming experiment was conducted in an alpine meadow at a low (4313 m), mid- (4513 m) and high elevation (4693 m) in the Northern Tibet since May 2010. Growing season vapor pressure...

Models predict that precipitation variability will increase with climate change. We used a 15-year precipitation manipulation experiment to determine if altering the timing and amount of growing season rainfall will impact plant community structure in annually burned, native tallgrass prairie. The altered precipitation treatment maintained the same total growing season precipitation as the ambi...

The flowering of grasses is a process critical to plant population dynamics and genetics, herbivore performance, and human health. To better understand the climate factors governing grass flowering, we analyzed the patterns of culm production over 25 years for three perennial tallgrass prairie species at Konza Prairie in Kansas, USA. The three species (Andropogon gerardii, Sorghastrum nutans, a...

A comparison of two statistical downscaling methods for daily maximum and minimum surface air temperature, total daily precipitation and total monthly precipitation at Indianapolis, IN, USA, is presented. The analysis is conducted for two seasons, the growing season and the non-growing season, defined based on variability of surface air temperature. The predictors used in the downscaling are in...

Records from a 76-year investigation into effects of line breeding and selection of Hereford cattle, and concurrent weather records, were used to assess effects of weather patterns on growth of suckling calves. Calf growth data were adjusted for trends arising from selection and inbreeding, and for effects of age of dam and sex of calf to produce clean estimates of year effects. Daily maximum a...

Soil microbial communities play an important role in forest ecosystem functioning, but how climate change will affect the community composition and consequently bacterial functions is poorly understood. We assessed the effects of reduced precipitation with the aim of simulating realistic future drought conditions for one growing season on the bacterial community and its relation to soil propert...

Scaling-up knowledge of land-atmosphere net ecosystem exchange (NEE) from a single experimental site to numerous perennial grass fields in the Northern Great Plains (NGP) requires appropriate scaling protocols. We addressed this problem using synoptic data available from the Landsat sensor for 10 growing seasons (April 15 to September 30) over a North Dakota field-site, where we continuously me...

[1] We evaluated D/H ratios of soiland plant-extracted water during the 1997 growing season to assess the influence of temperature, humidity, and rainfall on water distribution in deciduous forests. Three state parks (Chicot in Arkansas; Natchez in Mississippi, and St. Bernard in Louisiana) were identified along a 13.5-cm precipitation gradient established during the studied growing season with...

the normalized difference vegetation index (ndvi) derived from the spot 4 satellite has been widely used to monitor moisture-related vegetation condition. the relationship between vegetation and climate index, however, is complex and has not been adequately studied with satellite sensor data. to better understand this relationship, an analysis was conducted on time series of monthly ndvi (1999–...