Stream water temperature (tₛ) is a critical water quality parameter for aquatic ecosystems. However, tₛrecords are sparse or nonexistent in many river systems. In this work, we present an empirical model to predict tₛat the site scale across the USA. The model, derived using data from 171 reference sites selected from the Geospatial Attributes of Gages for Evaluating Streamflow database, describes the linear relationship between monthly mean air temperature (tₐ) and tₛ.

Understanding vegetation dynamics provides information on changes in land cover that can directly be related to regional changes in the climate system. In data-sparse regions, i.e. northwest Morocco studies are limited by the availability of comprehensive information on precipitation.

Over the past few decades, groundwater has become an essential commodity owing to increased demand as a result of growing population, industrialization, urbanization and so on. The water supply situation is expected to become more severe in the future because of continued unsustainable water use and projected change in hydrometeorological parameters due to climate change.

Deciduous shrub density and landcover are increasing across many areas of the Arctic. Shrub growth may be promoted by a snow–shrub feedback whereby relatively tall shrubs accumulate deeper snow, raising winter soil temperature minima, increasing microbial activity, and enhancing soil solution nitrogen (N). Although there is good evidence for the above components of the hypothesis, it has not yet been determined if shrubs can access the elevated N pool generated by deepened snow.

The central and eastern United States is an important food and timber production region and could potentially be a large-scale carbon sink. These characteristics are functions of the human management of the landscape and favorable soil and climate conditions. Large-scale assessments of carbon uptake and trends in net primary productivity (NPP) have been previously reported for this region using satellite observations, but they cannot quantify the contributions from changes in management and technology independently from climate effects.

Urban and community forests play an important role in the overall carbon budget of the USA. Accurately quantifying carbon sequestration by these forests can provide insight for strategic planning to mitigate greenhouse gas effects on climate change. This study provides a new methodology to estimate net forest carbon sequestration (FCS) in urban and community lands of northern New England using ground based forest growth rates, housing density data, satellite derived land cover and tree canopy cover maps at the county level.

The impacts of changes in water temperature and flow on selected water quality parameters, as one of the consequences of climate change, were studied in river catchments in the Czech Republic with little anthropogenic influence. The impact of climate change was manifested by an increase in stream temperature by 1.15°C over 28 years. The selected water quality parameters were dependent on flow, with up to 10-fold increases in the concentrations of ammonia, phosphorus and chlorophyll- a at minimum flow levels.

Big sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata Nuttall (Asteraceae), is the dominant plant species of large portions of semiarid western North America. However, much of historical big sagebrush vegetation has been removed or modified. Thus, regeneration is recognized as an important component for land management. Limited knowledge about key regeneration processes, however, represents an obstacle to identifying successful management practices and to gaining greater insight into the consequences of increasing disturbance frequency and global change.

Land and resource managers often use detection–nondetection surveys to monitor the populations of species that may be affected by factors such as habitat alteration, climate change, and biological invasions. Relative to mark‐recapture studies, using detection–nondetection surveys is more cost‐effective, and recent advances in statistical analyses allow the incorporation of detection probability, covariates, and multiple seasons.

Accurate spatio-temporal predictions of land-cover are fundamentally important for assessing geomorphological and ecological patterns and processes. This study quantifies the epistemic uncertainty in the species distribution modeling, which is generated by spatio-temporal gaps between the biogeographical data, model selection and model complexity. Epistemic uncertainty is generally given by the sum of subjective and objective uncertainty. The subjective uncertainty generated by the modeler-choice in the manipulation of the environmental variables was analyzed.

In Central Asia, water is a particularly scarce and valuable good. In many ecosystems of this region, the vegetation development during the growing season is dependent on water provided by rainfall. With climate change, alterations of the seasonal distribution of precipitation patterns and a higher frequency of extreme events are expected. Vegetation dynamics are likely to respond to these changes and thus ecosystem services will be affected.

Wildfires increased dramatically in frequency and extent in the European Mediterranean region from the 1960s, aided by a general warming and drying trend, but driven primarily by socio-economic changes, including rural depopulation, land abandonment and afforestation with flammable species. Published research into post-wildfire hydrology and soil erosion, beginning during the 1980s in Spain, has been followed by studies in other European Mediterranean countries together with Israel and has now attained a sufficiently large critical mass to warrant a major review.