An accessible account of the ways in which the world's plant life affects the climate. It covers everything from tiny local microclimates created by plants to their effect on a global scale. If you’ve ever wondered how vegetation can create clouds, haze and rain, or how plants have an impact on the composition of greenhouse gases, then this book is required reading.

The chapters in this section place the problems of vegetation and climate interactions in semi-arid regions into the context which recur throughout the book. First, Verstraete and Schwartz review desertification as a process of global change evaluating both the human and climatic factors. The theme of human impact and land management is discussed further by Roberts whose review focuses on semi-arid land-use planning. In the third and final chapter in this section we return to the meteorological theme. Nicholls reviews the effects of El Nino/Southern Oscillation on Australian vegetation stressing, in particular, the interaction between plants and their climatic environment. Vegetatio 91: 3-13, 1991. 3 A. Henderson-Sellers and A. J. Pitman (eds). Vegetation and climate interactions in semi-arid regions. © 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Desertification and global change 2 M. M. Verstraete! & S. A. Schwartz ! Institute for Remote Sensing Applications, CEC Joint Research Centre, Ispra Establishment, TP 440, 1-21020 Ispra (Varese), Italy; 2 Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI48109-2143, USA Accepted 24. 8. 1990 Abstract Arid and semiarid regions cover one third of the continental areas on Earth. These regions are very sensitive to a variety of physical, chemical and biological degradation processes collectively called desertification.

A state-of-the-art overview of the influence of terrestrial vegetation and soils within the Earth system. The text deals especially with interactions between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere via the hydrological cycle and their interlinkage with anthropogenic activities. Measurements gathered in integrated field experiments in the Sahel, the Amazon, North America and South-east Asia confirm the importance of these interactions. Observations are complemented by modelling studies, including regional models that simulate flows and transport in river catchments, coupled land-cover and regional climate systems, and Earth-system and global circulation models. Water, nutrient and sediment fluxes in river basins are also discussed and are shown to be highly impacted and regulated by humans through land use, pollution and river engineering. Finally, the book discusses environmental vulnerability and methodologies for assessing the risks associated with regional and global climatic and environmental variability and change. The results reported in this book are based on the research work of many individual scientists and teams around the world associated with the objectives of the IGBP-BAHC and WCRP-GEWEX international research programmes.

It is well known that the interactions between land surfaces and the atmosphere, and the resulting exchanges in water and energy have a tremendous affect on climate. The inadequate representation of land-atmosphere interactions is a major weakness in current climate models, and is providing the motivation for the HAPEX and ISLSCP experiments as well as the proposed Global Energy and Water Experiment (GEWEX) and the Earth Observing System (EOS) mission. The inadequate representation reflects the recognition that the well-known phys ical relationships, which are well described at small scales, result in different relationships when represented at the scales used in climate models. Understanding this transition in the mathematical relationships with increased space-time scales appears to be very difficult, and has led to different approaches; at one extreme, the famous "bucket" model where the land-surface is a simple one layer storage without vegetation; the other extreme may be Seller's Simple Biosphere Model (Sib) where one big leaf covers the climate model grid. Given the heterogeneous nature of landforms, soils and vegetation within a climate model grid, the development of new land surface parameterizations, and their verification through large scale experiments is perceived to be a challenging area of research for the hydrology and meteorology communities. This book evolved from a workshop held at Princeton University to explore the status of land surface parameterizations within climate models, and how observa tional data can be used to assess these parameterizations and improve models.

Tropical forests represent the world's most biodiverse ecosystems and play a key role in hydrology, carbon storage and exchange. Many of the human-induced pressures these regions are facing, e.g. fragmentation and deforestation, have been widely reported and well documented. However, there have been surprisingly few efforts to synthesize cutting-edge science in the area of tropical forest interaction with atmospheric change. At a time when our global atmosphere is undergoing a period of rapid change, both in terms of climate and in the cycling of essential elements such as carbon and nitrogen, a thorough and up-to-date analysis is now timely. This research level text, suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers in plant ecology, tropical forestry, climate change science, and conservation biology, explores the vigorous contemporary debate as to how rapidly tropical forests may be affected by atmospheric change, and what this may mean for their future.

Discusses how a knowledge of long-term change in ecosystems can inform and influence their conservation, integrating perspectives from archaeology, environmental history and palaeoecology.