Search results for "Vegetation"
showing 10 items of 1069 documents
Holocene land-cover reconstructions for studies on land cover-climate feedbacks
2010
The major objectives of this paper are: (1) to review the pros and cons of the scenarios of past anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) developed during the last ten years, (2) to discuss issues related to pollen-based reconstruction of the past land-cover and introduce a new method, REVEALS (Regional Estimates of VEgetation Abundance from Large Sites), to infer long-term records of past land-cover from pollen data, (3) to present a new project (LANDCLIM: LAND cover – CLIMate interactions in NW Europe during the Holocene) currently underway, and show preliminary results of REVEALS reconstructions of the regional land-cover in the Czech Republic for five selected time windows of the Holocene…
Analysis of drought and vulnerability in the North Darfur region of Sudan
2018
North Darfur of Sudan is located on the edge of the Sahara Desert and endures frequent droughts due to water shortages and high summer temperatures. Monitoring and understanding drought characteristics are essential for integrated drought risk mitigation and prevetion of land degradation. This study evaluates drought conditions in North Darfur by analyzing the spatiotemporal distribution of drought using three drought indices (Standardized Precipitation Index, Vegetation Condition Index, and Soil Moisture Content Index) and their combined drought index (CDI) from 2004 to 2013. Biophysical and socioeconomic indicators are further used to measure vulnerability to drought risk and its three co…
Using hydrological connectivity to detect transitions and degradation thresholds: Applications to dryland systems
2020
In arid and semi-arid ecosystems, shortage of water can trigger changes in landscapes’ structures and function leading to degradation and desertification. Hydrological connectivity is a useful framework for understanding water redistribution and scaling issues associated with runoff and sediment production, since human and/or natural disturbances alter surface water availability and pathways increasing/decreasing connectivity. In this paper, we illustrate the use of the connectivity framework for several examples of dryland systems that are analysed at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. In doing so, we draw particular attention to the analysis of coevolution of system structures and …
Global Groundwater-Vegetation Relations
2017
Groundwater is an integral component of the water cycle, and it also influences the carbon cycle by supplying moisture to ecosystems. However, the extent and determinants of groundwater-vegetation interactions are poorly understood at the global scale. Using several high-resolution data products, we show that the spatial patterns of ecosystem gross primary productivity and groundwater table depth are correlated during at least one season in more than two-thirds of the global vegetated area. Positive relationships, i.e., larger productivity under shallower groundwater table, predominate in moisture-limited dry to mesic conditions with herbaceous and shrub vegetation. Negative relationships, …
13C composition of dissolved organic carbon in upland forested catchments of the Morvan Mountains (France): Influence of coniferous and deciduous veg…
2007
10 pages; International audience; One of the main environmental changes caused by human activities is that of land use. These changes influence the quantity and quality of the dissolved organic matter (DOM) fluxes through the vegetation–soil–stream system. The aim of this work is to evaluate the influence of the substitution of native deciduous forests by well managed coniferous forests on dissolved organic carbon (DOC) fluxes and their associated carbon isotopic composition (d13CDOC). DOC fluxes and d13CDOC were monitored for 2 years in the streams of four similar upland forested catchments in the Morvan Mountains (France). Mean annual DOC concentrations and fluxes were 2–4 times lower in …
Monitoring elevation variations in leaf phenology of deciduous broadleaf forests from SPOT/VEGETATION time-series
2011
International audience; In mountain forest ecosystems where elevation gradients are prominent, temperature gradient-based phonological variability can be high. However, there are few studies that assess the capability of remote sensing observations to monitor ecosystem phenology along elevation gradients, despite their relevance under climate change. We investigated the potential of medium resolution remotely sensed data to monitor the elevation variations in the seasonal dynamics of a temperate deciduous broadleaf forested ecosystem. Further, we explored the impact of elevation on the onset of spring leafing. This study was based on the analysis of multi-annual time-series of VEGETATION da…
Predicting year of plantation with hyperspectral and lidar data
2017
This paper introduces a methodology for predicting the year of plantation (YOP) from remote sensing data. The application has important implications in forestry management and inventorying. We exploit hyperspectral and LiDAR data in combination with state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers. In particular, we present a complete processing chain to extract spectral, textural and morphological features from both sensory data. Features are then combined and fed a Gaussian Process Classifier (GPC) trained to predict YOP in a forest area in North Carolina (US). The GPC algorithm provides accurate YOP estimates, reports spatially explicit maps and associated confidence maps, and provides sens…
Estimating Gravimetric Moisture of Vegetation Using an Attenuation-Based Multi-Sensor Approach
2018
Estimating parameters for global climate models via combined active and passive microwave remote sensing data has been a subject of intensive research in recent years. A variety of retrieval algorithms has been proposed for the estimation of soil moisture, vegetation optical depth and other parameters. A novel attenuation-based retrieval approach is proposed here to globally estimate the gravimetric moisture of vegetation (m g ) and retrieve information about the amount of water [kg] per amount of wet vegetation [kg]. The parameter m g is particularly interesting for agro-ecosystems, to assess the status of growing vegetation. The key feature of the proposed approach is that it relies on mu…
Analysis of the radar vegetation index and assessment of potential for improvement
2018
The Radar Vegetation Index (RVI) is widely applied to indicate vegetation cover. The index includes the backscattering intensities of co- and cross-polarization that do not only contain information coming from vegetation scattering at longer wavelength (L-band), but also from the soil underneath. A forward modelling approach using active and passive microwave-derived parameters to obtain the scattering contribution of the soil is pursued. The idea of this research study is a subtraction of the attenuated soil scattering contribution from the measured backscattering intensities, to provide a clean vegetation-based solution, called improved RVI (RVII). For latter analysis, the vegetation volu…
Global-Scale Evaluation of Roughness Effects on C-Band AMSR-E Observations
2015
Quantifying roughness effects on ground surface emissivity is an important step in obtaining high-quality soil moisture products from large-scale passive microwave sensors. In this study, we used a semi-empirical method to evaluate roughness effects (parameterized here by the parameter) on a global scale from AMSR-E (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS) observations. AMSR-E brightness temperatures at 6.9 GHz obtained from January 2009 to September 2011, together with estimations of soil moisture from the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) L3 products and of soil temperature from ECMWF’s (European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasting) were used as inputs in a retrieval…