An interdisciplinary book tackling the challenges of managing peatlands and their ecosystem services in the face of climate change.

A discussion of the direct and indirect mechanisms by which fire and climate interact to influence carbon cycling in North American boreal forests. The first section summarizes the information needed to understand and manage fires' effects on the ecology of boreal forests and its influence on global climate change issues. Following chapters discuss in detail the role of fire in the ecology of boreal forests, present data sets on fire and the distribution of carbon, and treat the use of satellite imagery in monitoring these regions as well as approaches to modeling the relevant processes.

This volume is a synthesis of the NASA funded work under the Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Program. Hundreds of scientists have worked for the past eight years to understand one of the most important forces that is changing our planet-human impacts on land cover, that is land use. Its contributions span the natural and the social sciences, and apply state-of-the-art techniques for understanding the earth: satellite remote sensing, geographic information systems, modeling, and advanced computing. It brings together detailed case studies, regional analyses, and globally scaled mapping efforts. This is the most organized effort made to understand the dominant force that has been responsible for changing the Earth’s biosphere. Audience: This publication will be of interest to students, scientists, and policy makers. This volume includes a CD-ROM containing full color images of a selection of illustrations which are printed in black-and-white in the book.

This volume presents a state-of-the-art assessment of the Earth's climate system in Siberia and relationships between climate, ecosystems and people in that region. Changes in climatic variables and land cover in Siberia are among the earliest indicators of the Earth’s response to climate warming. The volume is a compilation of results from studies on climate, land-cover and land-use changes and their interactions with biogeochemical and water cycles, atmospheric aerosol, and human and wildlife populations in Siberia. Regional changes in Siberia are predicted to affect climate and people on a global scale. NASA, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and several European institutions have supported these studies. The primary supporter of the projects that produced the results compiled in this volume is the NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use Change Program, hence most studies use remote sensing in their research. The chapters in this volume were written by an international team of scientists from the USA, Europe and Russia under the auspices of the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI). This book will be of interest to those involved in studying recent and ongoing changes in Siberia, be they senior scientists, early career scientists or students.

This is the third volume in The Oxford Regional Environments series. The series volumes are devoted to major regions of the world, each presenting a detailed and up-to-date body of scientific knowledge concerning a particular region. For most topics on the physical geography of Northern Eurasia abundant literature now exists. Most of it, however, is in Russian and other East European languages and this has significantly limited the number of potential readers. This volume seeks to familiarize, at an international level, those with an interest in this area with the most significant achievements in classical and current geographical research. The Physical Geography of Northern Eurasia covers most of the territory of the former USSR. The first section discusses the individual compenents of the physical environment. These chapters cut across regional boundaries and treate the area discussed as a whole. A regional analysis follows mainly in the context of geographical zonation, though a number of specific regions are given individual treatment. The concluding chapters discuss the effects of anthropogenic activities on the physical environment. The approach is an integrative one, tying together various aspects of the physical environments with the environmental implications of human activites. Every component of the environment is treated as a step in the development of the multi-faceted landscapes which in turn provide possibilities and limitations for cultural and economic usage.

Starting with an account of the history and distribution of the conifers, this volume describes the most important areas in Asia, Europe, North and South America with conifer forests. The last in the "Ecosystem of the World" series, it deals with the functional aspects of the conifer forests, such as physiology, production, biomass, and more.