The HadGEM2 earth system climate model was used to assess the impact of biomass burning on surface ozone concentrations over the Amazon forest and its impact on vegetation, under present-day climate conditions. Here the researchers consider biomass burning emissions from wildfires, deforestation fires, agricultural forest burning, and residential and commercial combustion.

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Man was a foraging hunter–gatherer during the initial period of evolution. Later he started cultivating cereals and legumes and thus the transition from foraging to farming occurred. As a result, many of the useful wild plants have come under cultivation. Today, thousands of plant species are cultivated throughout the world for various uses. For most of those cultivated species, the wild populations exist in their natural habitats. However, there are some economically significant plants which are extinct in the wild, but survive only under cultivation due to their economical value.

As the climate warms, the carbon balance of arctic ecosystems will respond in two opposing ways: Plants will grow faster, leading to a carbon sink, while thawing permafrost will lead to decomposition and loss of soil carbon. However, thawing permafrost also releases nitrogen that fertilizes plant growth, offsetting some carbon losses. The balance of these processes determines whether these ecosystems will act as a stabilizing or destabilizing feedback to climate change.

Investigations of climate–growth interactions can shed light on the response of forest growth to climate change and the dendroclimatic reconstructions. However, most existing studies in the climatically important Tibetan Plateau (TP) and surrouding regions focus on linear growth responses to environmental variation. Herein we investigated both the linear and the nonlinear climate–growth interactions for 152 tree-ring chronologies in the TP and vicinity.

Changes in the phenology of vegetation activity may accelerate or dampen rates of climate change by altering energy exchanges between the land surface and the atmosphere and can threaten species with synchronized life cycles. Current knowledge of long-term changes in vegetation activity is regional, or restricted to highly integrated measures of change such as net primary productivity, which mask details that are relevant for Earth system dynamics. Such details can be revealed by measuring changes in the phenology of vegetation activity.

A new generation of an Earth system model now includes a number of land-surface processes directly relevant to analyzing potential impacts of climate change. This

Relative abundance and Shannon-Weiner species diversity index of true mangrove species were estimated in 10 sampling stations of Indian Sundarbans during 2013. The mangrove patches in the selected stations were categorized into a 4-point scale depending on the values of Shannon-Weiner species diversity index. The health of the mangrove forest as per our constructed 4-point scale was found to be regulated primarily by anthropogenic factors, although in station like Sagar South, the natural erosion may be the key player in determining the mangrove floral diversity.

Declines in the number of large trees in temperate and tropical forests have attracted attention, given their disproportionate importance to forest structure, function, and carbon storage. Yet, factors responsible for these declines are unclear. By comparing historic (1930s) and contemporary (2000s) surveys of California forests, we document that across 120,000 km2, large trees have declined by up to 50%, corresponding to a 19% decline in average basal area and associated biomass, despite large increases in small tree density.