Environmental Change in Siberia
Earth Observation, Field Studies and Modelling
Buch in deiner Nähe kaufen
Beschreibung
This book covers a round-up of environmental changes in Siberia with a focus on the terrestrial biosphere but also discussing climate and atmosphere and the hydrological cycle. It concludes with a discussion of information system approaches that are being developed to safeguard and make accessible spatial and temporal data for environmental studies.
Siberia is undergoing rapid transformations as a result of its climate vulnerability and the exceptionally high rate of warming it has undergone in recent decades. The information presented in this book was not easily accessible to the global change community before. Contributors include a wide range of Russian, European and North American authors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds including field ecology, satellite remote sensing and modelling.
The book investigates disturbance processes in the taiga forest with a focus on fire and logging, provides observational evidence of evergreen conifer invasion into larch dominated zones which could be a sign of climate change, and describes vegetation model predictions of shifting vegetation zones. Satellite observations of snow cover in Siberia are presented, and observed changes in river runoff described. The interactions between the hydrological cycle, the biosphere and the atmosphere are looked at from a variety of disciplinary viewpoints.
The Siberian environment is a unique region of the world that is both very strongly affected by global climate change and at the same time particularly vulnerable to its consequences. The news about the melting of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and the prospect of an ice-free shipping passage from Scandinavia to Alaska along the Russian north coast has sparked an international debate about natural resource exploitation, national boundaries and the impacts of the rapid changes on people, animals and plants. Over the last decades Siberia has also witnessed severe forest fires to an extent that is hard to imagine in other parts of the world where the po- lation density is higher, the fire-prone ecosystems cover much smaller areas and the systems of fire control are better resourced. The acceleration of the fire regime poses the question of the future of the boreal forest in the taiga region. Vegetation models have already predicted a shift of vegetation zones to the north under s- narios of global climate change. The implications of a large-scale expansion of the grassland steppe ecosystems in the south of Siberia and a retreat of the taiga forest into the tundra systems that expand towards the Arctic Ocean would be very signi- cant for the local population and the economy. I have studied Russian forests from remote sensing and modelling for about 11 years now and still find it a fascinating subject to investigate.
Highlighting a multitude of processes leading to environmental change in Siberia Provides a holistic view of the multiple scales at which environmental change processes operate today by combining an analysis of field observation, model results and satellite imagery Features information previously not accessible to the global change community Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Autor*in
Heiko Balzter
Themen in »Environmental Change in Siberia«
Taiga climate change ecoregion ecotone environmental change remote sensing vegetation virtual geographic environments remote sensing/photogrammetry