Do Changes in Connectivity Explain Desertification?

Okin, Gregory S.; Parsons, Anthony J.; Wainwright, John; Herrick, Jeffrey E.; Bestelmeyer, Brandon T.; Peters, Debra P. C.; Fredrickson, Ed L.

doi:10.1525/bio.2009.59.3.8

Cited by 209 publications

(208 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…Moreover, the productivity and cover of these exotics has also been reported to be enhanced with N deposition [92]. This process may favour the accumulation of flammable biomass and enhance the connectivity of otherwise isolated plant patches, further altering fire regime and severity [93].…”

Section: Global Environmental Change Effects On Drylandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

Maestre

Salguero‐Gómez

Quero

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

271

209

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Drylands occupy large portions of the Earth, and are a key terrestrial biome from the socio-ecological point of view. In spite of their extent and importance, the impacts of global environmental change on them remain poorly understood. In this introduction, we review some of the main expected impacts of global change in drylands, quantify research efforts on the topic, and highlight how the articles included in this theme issue contribute to fill current gaps in our knowledge. Our literature analyses identify key under-studied areas that need more research (e.g. countries such as Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Somalia, and deserts such as the Thar, Kavir and Taklamakan), and indicate that most global change research carried out to date in drylands has been done on a unidisciplinary basis. The contributions included here use a wide array of organisms (from micro-organisms to humans), spatial scales (from local to global) and topics (from plant demography to poverty alleviation) to examine key issues to the socio-ecological impacts of global change in drylands. These papers highlight the complexities and difficulties associated with the prediction of such impacts. They also identify the increased use of long-term experiments and multidisciplinary approaches as priority areas for future dryland research. Major advances in our ability to predict and understand global change impacts on drylands can be achieved by explicitly considering how the responses of individuals, populations and communities will in turn affect ecosystem services. Future research should explore linkages between these responses and their effects on water and climate, as well as the provisioning of services for human development and well-being.

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Section: Global Environmental Change Effects On Drylandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

Maestre

Salguero‐Gómez

Quero

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

271

209

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“…For instance, surface changes resulting from wind erosion can be linked to subsequent vegetation growth/dieback within a coupled CA framework (e.g., [2,25,26,33,174]). This approach is rooted in the concept of 'landscape connectivity' [175,176], which considers dryland landscapes as a series of conduits for processes (e.g., fire, wind and water propagation) that link vegetation growth, aeolian processes and external forcing factors through various biotic and abiotic feedbacks [41,177,178].…”

Section: Cellular Automaton (Ca) Modellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vegetation in Drylands: Effects on Wind Flow and Aeolian Sediment Transport

Mayaud

Webb

2017

Land

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Drylands are characterised by patchy vegetation, erodible surfaces and erosive aeolian processes. Empirical and modelling studies have shown that vegetation elements provide drag on the overlying airflow, thus affecting wind velocity profiles and altering erosive dynamics on desert surfaces. However, these dynamics are significantly complicated by a variety of factors, including turbulence, and vegetation porosity and pliability effects. This has resulted in some uncertainty about the effect of vegetation on sediment transport in drylands. Here, we review recent progress in our understanding of the effects of dryland vegetation on wind flow and aeolian sediment transport processes. In particular, wind transport models have played a key role in simplifying aeolian processes in partly vegetated landscapes, but a number of key uncertainties and challenges remain. We identify potential future avenues for research that would help to elucidate the roles of vegetation distribution, geometry and scale in shaping the entrainment, transport and redistribution of wind-blown material at multiple scales. Gaps in our collective knowledge must be addressed through a combination of rigorous field, wind tunnel and modelling experiments.

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“…Terrain attributes and vegetation types derived from the UAV products are captured explicitly in the Voronoi polygons. For example, the model domain incorporates higher slope areas near channel banks (Templeton et al 2014) and the important connectivity between bare soil patches in areas with woody plant encroachment (e.g., Mueller et al 2007, Okin et al 2009). Effects of landscape characteristics are apparent in the surface and subsurface interactions simulated by the model.…”

Section: Applications To Surface and Subsurface Interaction Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecohydrology with unmanned aerial vehicles

et al. 2014

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Abstract. High-resolution characterizations and predictions are a grand challenge for ecohydrology.Recent advances in flight control, robotics and miniaturized sensors using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide an unprecedented opportunity for characterizing, monitoring and modeling ecohydrologic systems at high-resolution (,1 m) over a range of scales. How can the ecologic and hydrologic communities most effectively use UAVs for advancing the state of the art? This Innovative Viewpoints paper introduces the utility of two classes of UAVs for ecohydrologic investigations in two semiarid rangelands of the southwestern U.S. through two useful examples. We discuss the UAV deployments, the derived image, terrain and vegetation products and their usefulness for ecohydrologic studies at two different scales. Within a land-atmosphere interaction study, we utilize high-resolution imagery products from a rotarywing UAV to characterize an eddy covariance footprint and scale up environmental sensor network observations to match the time-varying sampling area. Subsequently, in a surface and subsurface interaction study within a small watershed, we demonstrate the use of a fixed-wing UAV to characterize the spatial distribution of terrain attributes and vegetation conditions which serve as input to a distributed ecohydrologic model whose predictions compared well with an environmental sensor network. We also point to several challenges in performing ecohydrology with UAVs with the intent of promoting this new self-service (do-it-yourself ) model for high-resolution image acquisition over many scales. We believe unmanned aerial vehicles can fundamentally change how ecohydrologic science is conducted and offer ways to merge remote sensing, environmental sensor networks and numerical models.

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Do Changes in Connectivity Explain Desertification?

Cited by 209 publications

References 57 publications

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

Vegetation in Drylands: Effects on Wind Flow and Aeolian Sediment Transport

Ecohydrology with unmanned aerial vehicles

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