Filtyp
Traditional farming landscapes in the temperate zone that have persisted for millennia can be exceptionally species-rich and are therefore key conservation targets. In contrast to Europe’s West, Eastern Europe harbours widespread traditional farming landscapes, but drastic socio-economic and political changes in the twentieth century are likely to have impacted these landscapes profoundly. We reco
The renewed growth in atmospheric methane (CH4) since 2007 after a decade of stabilization has drawn much attention to its causes and future trends. Wetlands are the single largest source of atmospheric CH4. Understanding wetland ecosystems and carbon dynamics is critical to the estimation of global CH4 and carbon budgets. After approximately 7 years of CH4 related research following the renewed g
Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations ([CO2 ]) are expected to enhance photosynthesis and reduce crop water use. However, there is high uncertainty about the global implications of these effects for future crop production and agricultural water requirements under climate change. Here we combine results from networks of field experiments and global crop models to present a spatially explicit global
Recent evidence shows that warm semi-arid ecosystems are playing a disproportionate role in the interannual variability and greening trend of the global carbon cycle given their mean lower productivity when compared with other biomes (Ahlström et al. 2015 Science, 348, 895). Using multiple observations (land-atmosphere fluxes, biomass, streamflow and remotely sensed vegetation cover) and two state
Observations of vegetation phenology at regional-to-global scales provide important information regarding seasonal variation in the fluxes of energy, carbon, and water between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Numerous algorithms have been developed to estimate phenological transition dates using time series of remotely sensed spectral vegetation indices. A key challenge, however, is that differen
Northern peatlands store nearly one-third of terrestrial carbon (C) stocks while covering only 3% of the global landmass; nevertheless, the drivers of C cycling in these often-waterlogged ecosystems are different from those that control C dynamics in upland forested soils. To explore how multiple abiotic and biotic characteristics of bogs interact to shape microbial activity in a northern, foreste
The Arctic has warmed more than twice as fast as the global average since the late twentieth century, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification (AA). Recently, there have been considerable advances in understanding the physical contributions to AA, and progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms that link it to midlatitude weather variability. Observational studies overwhelmingly suppo
This study reconstructs the regional vegetation and climate dynamics between the upper Late Pleistoceneand Holocene around Pian del Lago, a coastal mountain marshland located at 831 m asl in westernLiguria (NW-Italy), based on the pollen analysis of a 13 m-long sediment core. The record provided aunique opportunity to study a poorly documented period in northern Italy and across many parts ofsouth
Dense time series of Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 imagery are creating exciting new opportunities to monitor, map, and characterize temporal dynamics in land surface properties with unprecedented spatial detail and quality. By combining imagery from the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager and the MultiSpectral Instrument on-board Sentinel-2A and -2B, the remote sensing community now has access to modera
This study investigates and compares soil moisture and hydrology projections of broadly used land models with permafrost processes and highlights the causes and impacts of permafrost zone soil moisture projections. Climate models project warmer temperatures and increases in precipitation (P) which will intensify evapotranspiration (ET) and runoff in land models. However, this study shows that most
Wildfire occurrence is influenced by climate, vegetation and human activities. A key challenge for understanding the risk of fires is quantifying the mediating effect of vegetation on fire regimes. Here, we explore the relative importance of Holocene land cover, land use, dominant functional forest type, and climate dynamics on biomass burning in temperate and boreo-nemoral regions of central and
The aim of this work is to develop and test a method for generation of information on vegetation dynamics from high-spatial resolution data, such as Sentinel-2. In order to accomplish this, Sentinel-2 data were simulated from existing SPOT HRG and HRVIR scenes over Sweden. We used TIMESAT, a well-tested computer package for generating smooth seasonal profiles and generation of seasonality paramete
Measurements of the land-atmosphere exchange of the greenhouse gases methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) in high Arctic tundra ecosystems are particularly difficult in the cold season, resulting in large uncertainty on flux magnitudes and their controlling factors during this long, frozen period. We conducted snowpack measurements of these gases at permafrost-underlain wetland sites in Zackenbe
Snow cover is one of the key factors controlling Arctic ecosystem functioning and productivity. In this study we assess the impact of strong variability in snow accumulation during 2 subsequent years (2013-2014) on the land-atmosphere interactions and surface energy exchange in two high-Arctic tundra ecosystems (wet fen and dry heath) in Zackenberg, Northeast Greenland. We observed that record-low
Methane (CH4) emissions from arctic tundra typically follow relations with soil temperature and water table depth, but these process-based descriptions can be difficult to apply to areas where no measurements exist. We formulated a description of the broader temporal flux pattern in the growing season based on two distinct CH4 source components from slow and fast-turnover carbon. We used automatic
The current downturn of the arctic cryosphere, such as the strong loss of sea ice, melting of ice sheets and glaciers, and permafrost thaw, affects the marine and terrestrial carbon cycles in numerous interconnected ways. Nonetheless, processes in the ocean and on land have been too often considered in isolation while it has become increasingly clear that the two environments are strongly connecte
Realistic projection of future climate-carbon (C) cycle feedbacks requires better understanding and an improved representation of the C cycle in permafrost regions in the current generation of Earth system models. Here we evaluated 10 terrestrial ecosystem models for their estimates of net primary productivity (NPP) and responses to historical climate change in permafrost regions in the Northern H
Global warming can substantially affect the export of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) from peat-permafrost to aquatic systems. The direct degradability of such peat-derived DOC, however, is poorly constrained because previous permafrost thaw studies have mainly addressed mineral soil catchments or DOC pools that have already been processed in surface waters. We incubated peat cores from a palsa mir
