Regional desertification: A global synthesis

The paper presents results on the use of NOAA AVHRR data for desertification monitoring on a regional–global level. It is based on processing of the GIMMS 8 km global NDVI data set. Time series of annually integrated and standardized annual NDVI anomalies were generated and compared with a corresponding rainfall data set (1981–2003).The regions studied include the Mediterranean basin, the Sahel from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, major parts of the drylands of Southern Africa, China–Mongolia and the drylands of South America, i.e. important parts of the desertification prone drylands of the world.It is concluded that the suggested methodology is a robust and reliable way to assess and monitor vegetation trends and related desertification on a regional–global scale. A strong general relationship between NDVI and rainfall over time is demonstrated for considerable parts of the drylands. The results of performed trend analysis cannot be used to verify any systematic generic land degradation/desertification trend at the regional–global level. On the contrary, a “greening-up” seems to be evident over large regions.     

A coupled human–environment model for desertification simulation and impact studies

This paper presents the development of a system dynamic model to simulate and analyze desertification.The human–environment coupled model integrates socio-economic drivers with bio-physical drivers of biomass production, land degradation and desertification. It is based on the UN and GEF definitions of desertification. It illustrates the concept of desertification through differential equation and simulation output graphics. It is supplemented with a causal loop diagram demonstrating the existing feed-back mechanisms.The model relates population pressure and dynamics over time to the growth and availability of biomass resources. The human population stock is described as a function of growth rate, death rate and resources dependent in and out migration of people. The relative growth rate of the stock of resources is modeled as a function of climate and exploitation pressure affecting soil erosion and water availability.The model is applied for the Sahelian desertification syndrome using input data to illustrate and simulate a 150 years period (1900–2050) in Kordofan, Sudan. The model indicates that it is difficult to generate irreversible desertification.     

An investigation of sand–dust storm events and land surface characteristics in China using NOAA NDVI data

Observations from 560 weather stations in China show that sand–dust storms occur most frequently in April in north China. The region consists of Sub-dry Mid Temperate, Dry Mid Temperate, Sub-dry South Temperate and Dry South Temperate Zones and much of the land surface is desert or semi-desert: it is relatively dry with minimal rainfall and a high annual mean temperature. In most regions of China, the annual mean frequency of sand–dust events decreased sharply between 1980 and 1997 and then increased from 1997 to 2000. Statistical analyses demonstrate that the frequency of sand–dust storms correlates highly with wind speed, which in turn is strongly related to land surface features; on the other hand, a significant correlation between storm events and other atmospheric quantities such as precipitation and temperature was not observed. Accordingly, land surface cover characteristics (vegetation, snowfall and soil texture) may play a significant role in determining the occurrence of sand–dust storms in China. Analysis of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index derived from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Empirical Orthogonal Function show that since 1995 surface vegetation cover in large areas of Northern China has significantly deteriorated. Moreover, a high correlation is shown to exist among the annual occurrence of sand–dust storms, surface vegetation cover and snowfall. This suggests that the deterioration of surface vegetation cover may strongly influence the occurrence of sand–dust storms in China. Soils with coarse and medium textures are found to be more associated with sand–dust storms than other soils.     

Climate sensitivity to changes in land surface characteristics

Using a recently developed global vegetation distribution, topography, and shorelines for the Early Eocene in conjunction with the Genesis version 2.0 climate model, we investigate the influences that these new boundary conditions have on global climate. Global mean climate changes little in response to the subtle changes we made; differences in mean annual and seasonal surface temperatures over northern and southern hemispheric land, respectively, are on the order of 0.5°C. In contrast, and perhaps more importantly, continental scale climate exhibits significant responses. Increased peak elevations and topographic detail result in larger amplitude planetary 4 mm/day and decreases by 7–9 mm/day in the proto Himalayan region. Surface temperatures change by up to 18°C as a direct result of elevation modifications. Increased leaf area index (LAI), as a result of altered vegetation distributions, reduces temperatures by up to 6°C. Decreasing the size of the Mississippi embayment decreases inland precipitation by 1–2 mm/day. These climate responses to increased accuracy in boundary conditions indicate that “improved” boundary conditions may play an important role in producing modeled paleoclimates that approach the proxy data more closely.     

A preliminary estimate of changing calcrete carbon storage on land since the Last Glacial Maximum

The glacial-to-interglacial shift in land carbon storage is important in understanding the global carbon cycle and history of the climate system. While organic carbon storage on land appears to have been much less than present during the cold, dry glacial maximum, calcrete (soil carbonate) carbon storage would have been greater. Here we attempt a global estimation of this change; we use published figures for present soil carbonate by biome to estimate changing global soil carbonate storage, on the basis of reconstruction of vegetation areas for four timeslices since the Last Glacial Maximum. It appears that there would most likely have been around a 30–45% decrease in calcrete carbon on land accompanying the transition between glacial and interglacial conditions. This represents a change of about 500–400 GtC (outer error limits are estimated at 750–200 GtC) . In order to be weathered into dissolved bicarbonate, this would take up an additional 500–400 GtC (750–200 GtC) in CO₂ from ocean/atmosphere sources. An equivalent amount to the carbonate leaving the caliche reservoir on land may have accumulated in coral reefs and other calcareous marine sediments during the Holocene, liberating an equimolar quantity of CO₂ back into the ocean-atmosphere system as the bicarbonate ion breaks up.     

Climatic pacing of Mediterranean fire histories from lake sedimentary microcharcoal

The microcharcoal content (particles < 180 µm) of overlapping sedimentary sequences from two crater lake basins in central Turkey are used to reconstruct the regional fire history of the East Mediterranean oak–grass parkland zone from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present-day. These results are correlated with stable isotope and pollen data from the same cores in order to assess the changing role of climate, vegetation and human activity in landscape burning. This indicates that climatically-induced variation in biomass availability was the main factor controlling the timing of regional fire activity during the Last Glacial–Interglacial climatic transition, and again during Mid-Holocene times, with fire frequency and magnitude increasing during wetter climatic phases. Spectral analysis of the Holocene part of the record from Eski Acıgöl indicates significant cyclicity with a periodicity of ~ 1500 years that may be linked with large-scale climate forcing. Although proto-agricultural societies were established in this region as early as 10,000 years ago, it is only during the last two to three millennia that the pacing of wildfire cycles appears to have become decoupled from climate and linked instead to human-induced changes in land cover and fuel load availability.     

Climatic and biological simulations in a two-way coupled atmosphere–biosphere model (CABM)

Today, most land surface process models have prescribed seasonal change of vegetation with regard to the exchange processes between land and the atmosphere. However, in order to consider the real interaction between vegetation and atmosphere and represent it best in a climate model, the vegetation growth process should be included. In other words, “life” should be brought into climate models. In this study, we have coupled the physical and biological components of AVIM (Atmosphere–Vegetation Interaction Model), a land surface model including plant ecophysiological processes, into the IAP/LASG L9 R15 GOALS GCM. To exhibit terrestrial vegetation information, the vegetation is given a high resolution of 1.5° by 1.5° to nest and couple the fine grid cells of land with the coarse grid cells of atmosphere, which is 7.5° longitude and 4.5° latitude. The simulated monthly mean surface air temperature and precipitation is close to the observations. The monthly mean Leaf Area Index (LAI) is consistent with the observed data. The global annual mean net primary production (NPP) simulation is also reasonable. The coupled model is stable, providing a good platform for research on two-way interaction between land and atmosphere, and the global terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle.     

The effect of vegetation in a climate model simulation on the Younger Dryas

The effect of vegetation on the Younger Dryas (YD) climate is studied by comparing the results of four experiments performed with the ECHAM-4 atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM): (1) modern control climate, (2) simulation with YD boundary conditions, but with modern vegetation, (3 and 4) identical to (2), but with paleo-vegetation. Prescribing paleo-vegetation instead of modern vegetation resulted in temperature anomalies (both positive and negative) of up to 4°C in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, mainly as an effect of changes in forest cover (change in albedo). Moreover, changes in precipitation and evaporation were found, most notably during December–January–February (DJF) in the tropics and were caused by the replacement of forests by grasslands. These results are consistent with other model studies on the role of vegetation changes on climate and they suggest that it is important in paleoclimate simulation studies to prescribe realistic vegetation types, belonging to the period of interest. However, in our case the addition of YD vegetation did not improve the agreement with proxy data in Europe, as the temperatures were increasing during winter compared to the YD simulation with modern vegetation. It must be noted that this increase was not statistically significant. The model-data mismatch suggests that other factors probably played an important role, such as permafrost and atmospheric dust. We infer that during the last glacial-interglacial transition, the time lag between the first temperature increase and the northward migration of trees, estimated at 500–1000 years, could have delayed the warming of the Eurasian continent. The relatively open vegetation that existed during the early stages of the last glacial-interglacial transition had a relatively high albedo, thus tempering warming up of the Eurasian land surfaces.     

Potential impacts of human-induced land cover change on East Asia monsoon

As one major performance of anthropogenic activities, human-induced land use and land cover changes in East Asia have been one of the largest regions in the world. In the past 3000 years, more than 60% of the region has been affected by conversion of various categories of natural vegetation into farmland, conversion of grassland into semidesert and widespread land degradation. Such human-induced land cover changes result in significant changes of surface dynamic parameters, such as albedo, surface roughness, leaf area index and fractional vegetation coverage, etc.The results of a pair of numerical experiments in this paper have shown that by altering the complex exchanges of water and energy from surface to atmosphere, the changes in land cover have brought about significant changes to the East Asian monsoon. These include weakening of the summer monsoon and enhancement of winter monsoon over the region and a commensurate increase in anomalous northerly flow. These changes result in the reduction of all components of surface water balance such as precipitation, runoff, and soil water content. The consequent diminution of northward and inland moisture transfer may be a significant factor in explaining the decreasing of atmospheric and soil humidity and thus the trend in aridification observed in many parts of the region, particularly over Northern China during last 3000 years.The variation of East Asia monsoon presented here is the result of land cover changes only. It is very likely that the anthropogenic modification of monsoon system would have been occurred in the long history of civilization.     

TOPO-EUROPE: The geoscience of coupled deep Earth-surface processes

TOPO-EUROPE addresses the 4-D topographic evolution of the orogens and intra-plate regions of Europe through a multidisciplinary approach linking geology, geophysics, geodesy and geotechnology. TOPO-EUROPE integrates monitoring, imaging, reconstruction and modelling of the interplay between processes controlling continental topography and related natural hazards. Until now, research on neotectonics and related topography development of orogens and intra-plate regions has received little attention. TOPO-EUROPE initiates a number of novel studies on the quantification of rates of vertical motions, related tectonically controlled river evolution and land subsidence in carefully selected natural laboratories in Europe. From orogen through platform to continental margin, these natural laboratories include the Alps/Carpathians–Pannonian Basin System, the West and Central European Platform, the Apennines–Aegean–Anatolian region, the Iberian Peninsula, the Scandinavian Continental Margin, the East-European Platform, and the Caucasus–Levant area. TOPO-EUROPE integrates European research facilities and know-how essential to advance the understanding of the role of topography in Environmental Earth System Dynamics. The principal objective of the network is twofold. Namely, to integrate national research programs into a common European network and, furthermore, to integrate activities among TOPO-EUROPE institutes and participants. Key objectives are to provide an interdisciplinary forum to share knowledge and information in the field of the neotectonic and topographic evolution of Europe, to promote and encourage multidisciplinary research on a truly European scale, to increase mobility of scientists and to train young scientists. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art of continental topography research, and of the challenges to TOPO-EUROPE researchers in the targeted natural laboratories.     

The history of environmental change and adaptation in eastern Saloum–Senegal—Driving forces and perceptions

Environmental change in the Sahel–Sudan zone of West Africa has been a major issue in development debates over the last decades. Using remote sensing based land cover change analysis, archival data, national and international statistical data, and household interviews, we analyze the drivers of environmental change in Eastern Saloum in Central East Senegal as well as the local perceptions of these changes and adaptation. Being part of the ground nut basin, Eastern Saloum has witnessed rapid environmental degradation caused by the conversion of forest and savanna areas to agricultural land during the last 20–30 years and by a combination of decline in precipitation, soil degradation, a diversity of policies with little concern for the environment, fluctuating markets and population pressure. Farmers perceive the environmental change mainly as land degradation and poor soil fertility, though recent extensification of agriculture counters this effect and has led to increased vegetation cover in marginal areas. They identified erratic climate, agricultural policies, insufficient food production and desire to increase income as the main drivers of change in the area. We conclude that while climate variability has influenced environmental change in the area, various types of State interventions in agriculture and global market fluctuations appear to have been the main underlying causes of environmental degradation.     

Perspectives on Environmental Earth System Dynamics

The quantification of geohazards and water resources in intraplate areas requires an integrated approach connecting monitoring, reconstruction and prediction of underlying processes. Intraplate rifts such as the Northwestern European rift system and coastal areas such as the Rhine–Meuse delta system are characterized by an interplay of climatic variations and neotectonics. The Netherlands Environmental Earth System Dynamics Initiative (NEESDI) addresses the interplay of lithosphere and surface processes through an integration of upper mantle and crustal scale studies with high-resolution analyses of the sedimentary record, geomorphology and hydrodynamic regime. Recent faulting imaged by seismic reflection data and trenching appears to exert a major control on uplift and subsidence patterns in the area, effecting coastal evolution and river dynamics in the Rhine–Meuse system.     

Scenarios of land cover in China

A method for surface modeling of land cover change (SMLC) is developed on the basis of establishing transition probability matrixes between land cover types and HLZ types. SMLC is used to simulate land cover scenarios of China for the years 2039, 2069 and 2099, for which HLZ scenarios are first simulated in terms of HadCM3 climatic scenarios that are downscaled in zonal model of spatial climate change in China. This paper also analyzes spatial distribution of land cover types, area change and mean center shift of each land cover type, ecotope diversity, and patch connectivity under the land cover scenarios. The results show that cultivated land would decrease and woodland would expand greatly with climatic change, which coincides with consequences expected by implementation of Grain-for-Green policy. Nival area would shrink, and desertification area would expand at a comparatively slow rate in future 100 years. Climate change would generally cause less ecotope diversity and more patch connectivity. Ecosystems in China would have a pattern of beneficial cycle after efficient ecological conservation and restoration. However, if human activities would exceed regulation capacity of ecosystems themselves, the ecosystems in China might deteriorate more seriously.     

Reconstruction of fire spread within wildland fire events in Northern Eurasia from the MODIS active fire product

Russian boreal forests have been reshaped by wildland fire for millennia. While fire is a natural component of boreal ecosystems, it impacts various aspects of the environment and affects human well-being. Often fires occur over large remote areas with limited access, which makes their ground-based observation difficult. A significant progress has been made in mapping burned area from satellite imagery, which provides consistent and fairly unbiased estimates of fire impact on areas of interest at multiple scales. Although the information provided by burned area products is highly important, the spatio-temporal dynamics of individual fire events and their impact are less known. In high northern latitudes of Northern Eurasia, MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) makes up to four daily observations from each of the Terra and Aqua satellites providing consistent data on fire development with high temporal frequency. Here we introduce an approach to reconstruct the development of fire events based on active fire detections from MODIS. Fire Spread Reconstruction (FSR) provides a means for characterization of fire occurrence over large territories from remotely sensed data. Individual fire detections are clustered within a GIS environment based on a set of rules determining proximity between fire observations in space and time. FSR determines the number of fire events, their approximate size, duration, and fire spread rate and allows for the analysis of fire occurrence and spread as a function of vegetation, fire season, fire weather and other parameters. FSR clusters were compared to burned scars mapped from Landsat7/ETM+ imagery over Yakutia (Russia). While some smaller burn scars were found to be formed through a continuous burning of a single fire event, large burned areas in Siberia were created by a constellation of fire events incorporating over 100 individual fire clusters. Geographic regions were found to have a stronger influence on the rates of fire activity in the area compared to vegetation zones. In addition, fire spread rates do not directly correlate with the intensity of a given fire season. FSR is also used to identify the points of ignition for individual fire events in spatio-temporal domain for fire danger and fire threat modeling. This approach presents another step towards the more complete characterization of fire events from remotely sensed data.     

Seasonal temperature responses to land-use change in the western United States

In the western United States, more than 79 000 km² has been converted to irrigated agriculture and urban areas. These changes have the potential to alter surface temperature by modifying the energy budget at the land–atmosphere interface. This study reports the seasonally varying temperature responses of four regional climate models (RCMs) – RSM, RegCM3, MM5-CLM3, and DRCM – to conversion of potential natural vegetation to modern land-cover and land-use over a 1-year period. Three of the RCMs supplemented soil moisture, producing large decreases in the August mean (− 1.4 to − 3.1 °C) and maximum (− 2.9 to − 6.1 °C) 2-m air temperatures where natural vegetation was converted to irrigated agriculture. Conversion to irrigated agriculture also resulted in large increases in relative humidity (9% to 36% absolute change). Modeled changes in the August minimum 2-m air temperature were not as pronounced or consistent across the models. Converting natural vegetation to urban land-cover produced less pronounced temperature effects in all models, with the magnitude of the effect dependent upon the preexisting vegetation type and urban parameterizations. Overall, the RCM results indicate that the temperature impacts of land-use change are most pronounced during the summer months, when surface heating is strongest and differences in surface soil moisture between irrigated land and natural vegetation are largest.     

Modeling the impacts of grazing land management on land-use change for the Jordan River region

In this article, we describe a simulation method for investigating the impacts of different grazing land management strategies on the productivity of (semi-)natural vegetation and the resulting feedback on land-use change. In a first application, we analyze the effects of sustainable and intensive grazing land management in the Jordan River region. For this purpose, we adapt and use the regional version of the spatially explicit modeling framework LandSHIFT. Our simulation experiments indicate that the modeled feedback mechanism has a strong effect on the spatial extent of grazing land. Consequently, the results of our study underline that the inclusion of such feedback mechanisms in land-use models can help to represent and analyze the complex interactions between humans and the environment in a more differentiated and realistic way, but they also identify the demand for more detailed empirical data on grazing land degradation in order to further improve the explanatory power of the model.     

Interpolating paleovegetation data with an artificial neural network approach

To drive an atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM), land surface boundary conditions like albedo and morphological roughness, which depend on the vegetation type present, have to be prescribed. For the late Quaternary there are some data available, but they are still sparse. Here an artificial neural network approach to assimilate these paleovegetation data is investigated. In contrast to a biome model the relation between climatological parameters and vegetation type is not based on biological knowledge but estimated from the available vegetation data and the AGCM climatology at the corresponding locations. For a test application, a data set for the modern vegetation reduced to the amount of data available for the Holocene climate optimum (about 6000 years B.P.) is used. From this, the neural network is able to reconstruct the complete global vegetation with a kappa value of 0.56. The most pronounced errors occur in Australia and South America in areas corresponding to large data gaps.     

Life crises on land across the Permian–Triassic boundary in South China

The western Guizhou and eastern Yunnan area of southwest China commands a unique and significant position globally in the study of Permian–Triassic boundary (PTB) events as it contains well and continuously exposed PTB sections of marine, non-marine and marginal-marine origin in the same area. By using a range of high-resolution stratigraphic methods including biostratigraphy, eventostratigraphy, chronostratigraphy and chemostratigraphy, not only are the non-marine PTB sections correlated with their marine counterparts in the study area with high-resolution, the non-marine PTB sections of the study area can also be aligned with the PTB Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) at Meishan in eastern China. Plant megafossils (“megaplants”) in the study area indicate a major loss in abundance and diversity across the PTB, and no coal beds and/or seams have been found in the non-marine Lower Triassic although they are very common in the non-marine Upper Permian. The megaplants, however, did not disappear consistently across the whole area, with some elements of the Late Permian Cathaysian Gigantopteris flora surviving the PTB mass extinction and locally even extending up to the Lower Triassic. Palynomorphs exhibit a similar temporal pattern characterized by a protracted stepwise decrease from fern-dominated spores in the Late Permian to pteridosperm and gymnosperm-dominated pollen in the Early Triassic, which was however punctuated by an accelerated loss in both abundance and diversity across the PTB. Contemporaneous with the PTB crisis in the study area was the peculiar prevalence and dominance of some fungi and/or algae species.The temporal patterns of megaplants and palynomorphs across the PTB in the study area are consistent with the regional trends of plant changes in South China, which also show a long-term decrease in species diversity from the Late Permian Wuchiapingian through the Changhsingian to the earliest Triassic, with about 48% and 77% losses of species occurring respectively in the end-Wuchiapingian and end-Changhsingian. Such consistent patterns, at both local and regional scales, contradict the hypothesis of a regional isochronous extinction of vegetation across the PTB, and hence call into question the notion that the end-Permian mass extinction was a one-hit disaster. Instead, the data from the study area and South China appears more consistent with a scenario that invokes climate change as the main driver for the observed land vegetation changes across the PTB in South China.     

Multitemporal analysis of PAL images for the study of land cover dynamics in South America

Pathfinder AVHHR Land (PAL) database has been used for the retrieval of Land Surface Temperature (LST) over South America, which, along with NDVI parameter, will allow the studying of the evolution of the vegetation between July 1981 and September 2001. To this end, a classification has been built, based on PAL NDVI and Reanalysis air temperature at 2 m height data. This classification takes into account both vegetation and thermal patterns, and has been validated by a comparison with CAZALAC's map of arid zones (Centro del Agua para Zonas Áridas y semiáridas de Latino-América y el Caribe), as well as with Global Land Cover Characteristics' classification built by the USGS (United States Geological Survey). The principal advantage of this new classification is that it is a dynamic classification, that considers the actual state of the cover, since no assumption on land occupation is made for its construction. LST and NDVI yearly and long-term evolutions are analyzed with the help of this classification. Yearly evolutions are compared with Reanalysis air temperature at 2 m height and precipitation, and show good concordance. LST long-term evolution shows to be strongly affected by satellite changes and orbital drift. These latter require an adequate correction to allow deeper study. On the other hand, NDVI does not show this trend, but aerosol absorption from Mount Pinatubo's eruption in June 1991 corrupts temporarily the data. These results also validate the above-mentioned classification.     

Are dust storm activities in North China related to Arctic ice–snow cover?

The generation and development of dust storms are controlled by land surface conditions and atmospheric circulations. The latter, in turn, is influenced by the global ice–snow cover. In this study, we examine the relationship between the characteristics of dust storm activities in north China and the changes of global climate patterns. In particular, we are interested in whether Arctic ice–snow cover is related to the dust storm frequencies and intensities in north China. Our analysis, based on the monthly data for the period from 1954 to 1994, shows that this is indeed the case. This result suggests that the Arctic ice–snow cover can be used for the long-term prediction of dust storm activities in north China, and dust storm activities also serve as an indicator of global climate change.