This book focuses on grassland ecosystem evaluation including vegetation coverage, net primary productivity, carbon sink accounting, and grassland degradation evaluation based on mutual data resource, ecosystem model simulation, remote sensing monitoring and driving mechanism exploration. It aims to provide a guide seeking to understand the overall situation of grassland in China in the context of global climate change and build a scenario for the driving force quantitative evaluation. It will be an essential reference to the terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle and degraded grassland ecological restoration engineer implementation. Chapters are carefully developed to cover (1) situation of grassland in China; (2) spatial-temporal of grassland coverage in China;(3) net primary productivity evaluation; (4) carbon sink/source accounting and its carbon-hydrology effect;(5) grassland landscape pattern; (6) grassland degradation evaluation based on remote sensing;(7) Grassland degradation restoration and constructing green ecological protective screen. The new scenario and driving mechanism evaluation model make this book a valuable read for researcher of land ecosystem carbon cycle, ecosytem degradation remote sensing evaluation as well as organizations engaged in eco-restoration practices.

Savanna and grassland biomes cover more of the earth's surface than any other biome type, and yet they are still largely understudied. In recent decades, global savanna and grassland ecosystems have become more prominent in the literature focused on global change dynamics. Savanna and grasslands represent unique biomes with their own challenges, both in terms of their study and in terms of their complexity, leading to many contradictory and often controversial findings. The global threats to these systems are potentially significant, from climate change impacts to human management challenges, from possible degradation to complete desertification, which vary across disturbance regime shifts. This Special Issue of Applied Sciences, “Dynamics of Global Savanna and Grassland Biomes”, is intended for a wide and interdisciplinary audience, and covers recent advances in: - drivers of vegetation dynamics - further understanding carbon interactions in these critical landscapes - advances in modeling both current and future system states - tipping points in savanna systems - human-environment interactions and challenges for management - biodiversity and ecosystem services

This volume is a synthesis of the NASA funded work under the Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Program. Hundreds of scientists have worked for the past eight years to understand one of the most important forces that is changing our planet-human impacts on land cover, that is land use. Its contributions span the natural and the social sciences, and apply state-of-the-art techniques for understanding the earth: satellite remote sensing, geographic information systems, modeling, and advanced computing. It brings together detailed case studies, regional analyses, and globally scaled mapping efforts. This is the most organized effort made to understand the dominant force that has been responsible for changing the Earth’s biosphere. Audience: This publication will be of interest to students, scientists, and policy makers. This volume includes a CD-ROM containing full color images of a selection of illustrations which are printed in black-and-white in the book.

Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session

During the last decades, soil organic carbon (SOC) attracted the attention of a much wider array of specialists beyond agriculture and soil science, as it was proven to be one of the most crucial components of the earth’s climate system, which has a great potential to be managed by humans. Soils as a carbon pool are one of the key factors in several Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goal 15, “Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss” with the SOC stock being explicitly cited in Indicator 15.3.1. This technical manual is the first attempt to gather, in a standardized format, the existing data on the impacts of the main soil management practices on SOC content in a wide array of environments, including the advantages, drawbacks and constraints. This manual presents different sustainable soil management (SSM) practices at different scales and in different contexts, supported by case studies that have been shown with quantitative data to have a positive effect on SOC stocks and successful experiences of SOC sequestration in practical field applications. Volume 3 includes a total of 49 practices that have a direct impact on SOC sequestration and maintenance in cropland, grassland, integrated systems and farming approaches.

The period since World War II, and especially the last decade influenced by the International Biological Program, has seen enormous growth in research on the function of ecosystems. The same period has seen an exponential' rise in environmental problems including the capacity of the Earth to support man's population. The concern extends to man's effects on the "biosphere"-the film of living organisms on the Earth's surface that supports man. The common theme of ecologic research and environmental concerns is primary production the binding of sunlight energy into organic matter by plants that supports all life. Many results from the IBP remain to be synthesized, but enough data are available from that program and other research to develop a convincing sum mary of the primary production of the biosphere-the purpose of this book. The book had its origin in the parallel interests of the two editors and Gene E. Likens, which led them to prepare a symposium on the topic at the Second Biological Congress of the American Institute of Biological Sciences in Miami, Florida, October 24, 1971. Revisions of the papers presented at that symposium appear as Chapters 2, 8, 9, 10, and 15 in this book. We have added other chapters that complement this core; these include discussion and evaluation of methods for measuring productivity and regional production, current findings on tropical productivity, and models of primary productivity.