QUESTIONS: How has the vegetation of the major biomes (Grassland, Nama‐karoo, Albany Thicket, Azonal) of southeastern South Africa changed over the course of the 20th century? How do changes in climate and land‐use drivers relate to long‐term changes in vegetation? What are the implications of these findings for land degradation hypotheses and future climate change projections for the region? LOCATION: The biogeographically complex semi‐arid, Karoo Midlands region of the southeastern part of South Africa.

Pollen, phytolith and charcoal records from the archaeological wetland site of Kuk Swamp, Wahgi Valley, Papua New Guinea spanning the period from

It is increasingly recognised that designing and implementing adaptive land management and development policies for the coastal zone requires an interdisciplinary and integrated approach. Yet, integrative thinking and action often remain problematic due to the competing interests and ambitions involved in coastal zone planning and management and the legacy of established development on the coast.

REDD projects have received considerable attention for their potential to mitigate the effects of climatic change. However, the existing literature has been slow to assess the impacts of proposed REDD projects on the livelihoods of forest communities in the developing world, or the implications of these local realities for the success of REDD+ initiatives in general. This study presents ethnographic research conducted with communities within the April-Salomei pilot REDD+ Project in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

Stream water temperature (tₛ) is a critical water quality parameter for aquatic ecosystems. However, tₛrecords are sparse or nonexistent in many river systems. In this work, we present an empirical model to predict tₛat the site scale across the USA. The model, derived using data from 171 reference sites selected from the Geospatial Attributes of Gages for Evaluating Streamflow database, describes the linear relationship between monthly mean air temperature (tₐ) and tₛ.

Understanding vegetation dynamics provides information on changes in land cover that can directly be related to regional changes in the climate system. In data-sparse regions, i.e. northwest Morocco studies are limited by the availability of comprehensive information on precipitation.

Urban and community forests play an important role in the overall carbon budget of the USA. Accurately quantifying carbon sequestration by these forests can provide insight for strategic planning to mitigate greenhouse gas effects on climate change. This study provides a new methodology to estimate net forest carbon sequestration (FCS) in urban and community lands of northern New England using ground based forest growth rates, housing density data, satellite derived land cover and tree canopy cover maps at the county level.

The impacts of changes in water temperature and flow on selected water quality parameters, as one of the consequences of climate change, were studied in river catchments in the Czech Republic with little anthropogenic influence. The impact of climate change was manifested by an increase in stream temperature by 1.15°C over 28 years. The selected water quality parameters were dependent on flow, with up to 10-fold increases in the concentrations of ammonia, phosphorus and chlorophyll- a at minimum flow levels.

Over the past few decades, groundwater has become an essential commodity owing to increased demand as a result of growing population, industrialization, urbanization and so on. The water supply situation is expected to become more severe in the future because of continued unsustainable water use and projected change in hydrometeorological parameters due to climate change.

Deciduous shrub density and landcover are increasing across many areas of the Arctic. Shrub growth may be promoted by a snow–shrub feedback whereby relatively tall shrubs accumulate deeper snow, raising winter soil temperature minima, increasing microbial activity, and enhancing soil solution nitrogen (N). Although there is good evidence for the above components of the hypothesis, it has not yet been determined if shrubs can access the elevated N pool generated by deepened snow.

The central and eastern United States is an important food and timber production region and could potentially be a large-scale carbon sink. These characteristics are functions of the human management of the landscape and favorable soil and climate conditions. Large-scale assessments of carbon uptake and trends in net primary productivity (NPP) have been previously reported for this region using satellite observations, but they cannot quantify the contributions from changes in management and technology independently from climate effects.

Big sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata Nuttall (Asteraceae), is the dominant plant species of large portions of semiarid western North America. However, much of historical big sagebrush vegetation has been removed or modified. Thus, regeneration is recognized as an important component for land management. Limited knowledge about key regeneration processes, however, represents an obstacle to identifying successful management practices and to gaining greater insight into the consequences of increasing disturbance frequency and global change.