Vegetation-Climate Interaction

How Plants Make the Global Environment
2., Softcover Nachdruck of hardcover 2. Auflage 2009. 2009
ISBN: 978-3-642-26905-9
Verlag: Springer

Buch, Englisch, 266 Seiten, Previously published in hardcover, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 243 mm, Gewicht: 520 g

Reihe: Environmental Sciences

This book offers a readable and accessible account of the ways in which the world's plant life partly controls its own environment. Starting from the broad patterns in vegetation which have classically been seen as a passive response to climate, the authors build up from the local scale - with microclimates produced by plants - to the regional and global scale. Coverage includes the influence of plants (both on land and in the ocean) in making clouds, haze and rain, along with plant effects on the composition of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere. The book explores broad global feedbacks that either stabilize or destabilize the earth's environment, in the context of environmental change in the recent geological past, and in the near future. The book also reviews common contentions and misconceptions about the role of vegetation or forest removal in the spread of deserts.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Adams, Jonathan

Fachgebiete

• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Botanik Pflanzenökologie
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Angewandte Ökologie
• Geowissenschaften Geologie Meteorologie, Klimatologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

The climate system.- From climate to vegetation.- Plants on the move.- Microclimates and vegetation.- The desert makes the desert: Climate feedbacks from the vegetation of arid zones.- Forests.- Plants and the carbon cycle.- The direct carbon dioxide effect on plants.

Über Autor(innen)

Jonathan Adams has a very diverse background in the environmental sciences, including biogeography, classical ecology, Quaternary geology and earth system science. He has published in international journals on all of these topics and collaborated with some of the best known scientists in these fields. He has also organized meetings and edited special issues of journals on earth system science. Thus, he has the inter-disciplinary knowledge necessary to tackle a subject as far-reaching and many-faceted as vegetation-climate interactions, on a range of spatial scales and time scales.