Explore the vast range of titles available.

Background: Resurveying historical vegetation plots has become more and more popular in recent years as it provides a unique opportunity to estimate vegetation and environmental changes over the past decades. Most historical plots, however, are not permanently marked and uncertainty in plot location, in addition to observer bias and seasonal bias, may add significant errors to temporal change. These errors may have major implications for the reliability of studies on long-term environmental change and deserve closer attention of vegetation ecologists. Methods: Vegetation data obtained from the resurveying of non-permanently marked plots are assessed for their potential to study environmental change effects on plant communities and the challenges the use of such data have to meet. We describe the properties of vegetation resurveys, distinguishing basic types of plots according to relocation error, and we highlight the potential of such data types for studying vegetation dynamics and their drivers. Finally, we summarize the challenges and limitations of resurveying non-permanently marked vegetation plots for different purposes in environmental change research. Results and conclusions: Re-sampling error is caused by three main independent sources of error: error caused by plot relocation, observer bias and seasonality bias. For relocation error, vegetation plots can be divided into permanent and non-permanent plots, while the latter are further divided into quasi-permanent (with approximate relocation) and non-traceable (with random relocation within a sampled area) plots. To reduce the inherent sources of error in resurvey data, the following precautions should be followed: (i) resurvey historical vegetation plots whose approximate plot location within a study area is known; (ii) consider all information available from historical studies in order to keep plot relocation errors low; (iii) resurvey at times of the year when vegetation development is comparable to the historical survey to control for seasonal variability in vegetation; (iv) retain a high level of experience of the observers to keep observer bias low; and (v) edit and standardize data sets before analyses.

The Three Rivers Source Region (TRSR), the headwater region of the Yellow River, the Mekong River, and the Yangtze River, plays a significant role in water resources, food security, economy, and society in the downstream areas. This study applied a series of offline regional simulations of the Community Land Model (CLM5.0) over the TRSR to evaluate the impacts of regional climate and vegetation change on runoff. Firstly, we evaluated the performance of runoff depth using CLM5.0, the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency between the simulated and observed runoff of TNH and ZMD gage stations are 0.56 and 0.51, respectively. The climate on the TRSR shows a warming and wetting trend, with the fastest warming rate in DJF (December, January, and February) and the fastest wetting rate in JJA (June, July, and August). Runoff increases in most of the TRSR with increased precipitation and decreases in the southeast of the Yellow River Source Region (YRSR). With increasing temperature, the simulated runoff shows a decreasing trend, while runoff tends to increase with precipitation enhancement over the TRSR. The results indicated that precipitation is the dominant factor affecting evapotranspiration (ET) and runoff, whilst the contribution of increasing temperature to runoff is 12%, which plays a regulatory role in the increased streamflow. In addition, Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) in CLM5.0 was used to study the impact of vegetation change on runoff. Compared to the static vegetation, the simulated leaf area index (LAI) from the DGVM shows an increasing trend in most regions of the TRSR and the runoff in the TRSR decreases by 33%.

The arid and semi-arid regions of northwest China are characterized by sparse vegetation and fragile ecosystems, making them highly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and human activities. Based on observed meteorological data, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the Lund–Potsdam–Jena dynamic global vegetation model (LPJ), a vegetation recovery potential model, and the MK trend test method, this study investigated the spatiotemporal distribution of vegetation recovery potential in northwest China and its relationship with global warming and increasing precipitation. The results indicated that vegetation in northwest China significantly increased, with greening closely related to trends in warming and wetting during 1982–2019. However, the vegetation recovery potential declined due to climate change. Central and southern Xinjiang and central Qinghai exhibited higher grassland recovery potential, while the central Gobi Desert areas of northwest China had lower recovery potential. The eastern part of northwest China was highly sensitive to drought, with moderate vegetation growth and recovery potential. Remote sensing data indicated a 2.3% increase in vegetation coverage in the region, with an average vegetation recovery potential index (IVCP) of 0.31. According to the results of LPJ model, the average vegetation recovery potential index for northwest China was 0.14, indicating a 1.1% improvement potential in vegetation coverage. Overall, climate warming and wetting facilitated vegetation recovery in northwest China, particularly in mountainous areas. The findings provide valuable insights for ecological restoration efforts and offer practical guidance for combating desertification and enhancing sustainable development. Moreover, these results underline the importance of incorporating vegetation recovery potential into regional policy-making to improve environmental resilience in the face of ongoing climate change.

This study investigates the impact of climate-vegetation interaction on future climate changes over West Africa using a regional climate model with synchronous coupling between climate and natural vegetation, the RegCM4.3.4-CLM-CN-DV. Based on the lateral boundary conditions supplied by MIROC-ESM and CESM under the greenhouse gas Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, significant increase of vegetation density is projected over the southern part of Sahel, with an increase of leaf area index and a conversion from grass to woody plants around 7–10°N of Sahel. Regardless of whether the model treats vegetation as static or dynamic, it projects an increase of precipitation in eastern Sahel and decrease in the west. The feedback due to projected vegetation change tends to cause a wet signal, enhancing the projected increase or alleviate the decrease of precipitation in JJA in the areas of projected vegetation increase. Its impact is negligible in DJF. Vegetation feedback slightly enhances projected warming in most of West Africa during JJA, but has a significant cooling effect during DJF in regions of strong vegetation changes. Future changes of surface runoff are projected to follow the direction of precipitation changes. While dynamic vegetation feedback enhances the projected increase of soil water content in JJA, it has a drying effect in DJF. The magnitude of projected ET changes is reduced in JJA and increased in DJF due to vegetation dynamics. A high sensitivity of climate projection to dynamic vegetation feedback was found mainly in semiarid areas of West Africa, with little signal in the wet tropics.

Form and function are two major characteristics of hydrological systems. While form summarizes the structure of the system, function represents the hydrological response. Little is known about how these characteristics evolve and how form relates to function in young hydrological systems. We investigated how form and function evolve during the first millennia of landscape evolution. We analyzed two hillslope chronosequences in glacial forelands, one developed from siliceous and the other from calcareous parent material. Variables describing hillslope form included soil physical properties, surface, and vegetation characteristics. Variables describing hydrological function included soil water response times, soil water storage, drainage, and dominant subsurface flow types. We identified links between form and hydrological function via cluster analysis. Clusters identified based on form were compared in terms of their hydrological functioning. The comparison of the two different parent materials shows how strongly landscape evolution is controlled by the underlying geology. Soil pH appears to be a key variable influencing vegetation, soil formation and subsequently hydrology. At the calcareous site, the high buffering capacity of the soil leads to less soil formation and fast, vertical subsurface water transport dominates the water redistribution even after more than 10,000 years of landscape evolution. At the siliceous site, soil acidification results in accumulation of organic material, a high water storage capacity, and in podsolization. Under these conditions water redistribution changes from vertical subsurface water transport at the young age classes to water storage in the organic surface layer and lateral subsurface water transport within 10,000 years. Key Points The underlying geology controls landscape evolution in glacial forefields After 10,000 years of evolution, hillslope form and hydrological functioning differ between the calcareous and siliceous sites Soil pH is a key variable indicative of differences in soil evolution and hydrological response between the two forefields

Volcanic eruptions play an important role in vegetation dynamics and its historical range of variability. However, large events are infrequent and eruptions with a significant imprint in today's vegetation occurred far in the past, limiting our understanding of ecological processes. Volcanoes in southern Andes have been active during the last 10 ka and support unique ecosystems such as the Araucaria–Nothofagus forest. Araucaria is an endangered species, with a fragmented distribution and well‐adapted to fire and volcanic disturbances. Yet, it was suggested that volcanism might have increased the fragmentation. Through the use of pollen and tephra analysis from a sedimentary record, this paleoecological study aims to provide an insight into the vegetation responses to past volcanic disturbances, to assess the role of volcanic disturbance on the vegetation dynamics and to determine if the current fragmentation has been caused by volcanism. Results show that during the last 9 kyr, 39 tephra falls buried the vegetation around Lake Relem, more frequently between 4 and 2 ka. The pollen percentage indicates that the vegetation changed after small tephra fall but seldom caused significant changes. However, the large eruption of Sollipulli volcano (~3 ka) changed the environmental conditions affecting severely the vegetation. Ephedra dominated the early successional stage, perhaps facilitating Nothofagus recovering after ~500 years. Slight increase of Araucaria and Nothofagus obliqua‐type pollen percentages suggests that forest resisted without permanent changes and recovered relatively fast after the large eruption, perhaps because of sparse biological legacies distributed in the landscape. In the study area, the relative stability of Araucaria pollen after several tephra fall suggests no change in its past distribution at the current forest‐steppe ecotone, thus not affecting its current conservation status. Perhaps, random factors, the colonization patterns of the high elevations in the Andes after deglaciation and topography might play a more important role than previously thought. Although past volcanic eruption might have affected the distribution of Araucaria' populations, thus its conservation status, I found no evidences that past tephra fall has impacted negatively the populations far from the volcanic source. Early succecional stages after severe tephra fall deposition were better explained by Ephedra' drought tolerance, dispersal, and regrowing mechanism, rather than the expected Nothofagus and Araucaria' shadow‐intolerant mechanism.

Background Historically, reburn dynamics from cultural and lightning ignitions were central to the ecology of fire in the western United States (wUS), whereby past fire effects limited future fire growth and severity. Over millennia, reburns created heterogenous patchworks of vegetation and fuels that provided avenues and impediments to the flow of future fires, and feedbacks to future fire event sizes and their severity patterns. These dynamics have been significantly altered after more than a century of settler colonization, fire exclusion, and past forest management, now compounded by rapid climatic warming. Under climate change, the area impacted by large and severe wildfires will likely increase — with further implications for self-regulating properties of affected systems. An in-depth understanding of the ecology of reburns and their influence on system-level dynamics provides a baseline for understanding current and future landscape fire-vegetation interactions. Results Here, we present a detailed characterization of REBURN — a geospatial modeling framework designed to simulate reburn dynamics over large areas and long time frames. We interpret fire-vegetation dynamics for a large testbed landscape in eastern Washington State, USA. The landscape is comprised of common temperate forest and nonforest vegetation types distributed along broad topo-edaphic gradients. Each pixel in a vegetation type is represented by a pathway group (PWG), which assigns a specific state-transition model (STM) based on that pixel’s biophysical setting. STMs represent daily simulated and annually summarized vegetation and fuel succession, and wildfire effects on forest and nonforest succession. Wildfire dynamics are driven by annual ignitions, fire weather and topographic conditions, and annual vegetation and fuel successional states of burned and unburned pixels. Conclusions Our simulation study is the first to evaluate how fire exclusion and forest management altered the active fire regime of this landscape, its surface and canopy fuel patterns, forest and nonforest structural conditions, and the dynamics of forest reburning. The REBURN framework is now being used in related studies to evaluate future climate change scenarios and compare the efficacy of fire and fuel management strategies that either enable the return of active fire regimes or depend on fire suppression and wildfire effects on forest burning.

The current study presents a comprehensive 65-year diachronic analysis of the Atriplex mauritanica-Suaeda fruticosa subassociation in eastern Chott Chergui, Algeria. By resurveying historical plots from 1954 in 2019, the present study quantifies shifts in taxonomic composition, life‐form spectra, biogeographic affinities, and diversity metrics (Shannon-Wiener index, Pielou’s evenness, Margalef’s richness, Jaccard similarity, Cohen’s d). Species richness declined by 26.1 %, with therophytes decreasing from 68 % to 51 % and chamaephytes increasing from 19 % to 31 %. A significant decline in Shannon diversity (from 3.97 to 3.70, Welch’s t = 3.12, p<0.001) and a Jaccard similarity of only 0.46 confirm substantial floristic turnover. Endemic taxa persisted (100 %), while mesic Mediterranean and pluri-regional elements contracted. The emergence of Saharo‐Sahelian Atractylis serratuloides highlights ongoing xerophytization under accelerating aridification. Conservation of this fragile ecosystem demands a combination of livestock exclusion and soil restoration, along with continuous climate monitoring. These efforts should be underpinned by multivariate and trait‐based analyses to pinpoint the drivers of change. Beyond documenting a hallmark of Mediterranean desertification, our study delivers a concise, transferable framework for long‐term vegetation‐change assessments in other climate‐sensitive steppes.