Vegetation-Climate Interaction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxviii

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2. The climate system

   • Jonathan Adams

   Pages 1-25

3. From climate to vegetation

   • Jonathan Adams

   Pages 27-65

4. Plants on the move

   • Jonathan Adams

   Pages 67-96

5. Microclimates and vegetation

   • Jonathan Adams

   Pages 97-119

6. The desert makes the desert: Climate feedbacks from the vegetation of arid zones

   • Jonathan Adams

   Pages 121-151

7. Forests

   • Jonathan Adams

   Pages 153-179

8. Plants and the carbon cycle

   • Jonathan Adams

   Pages 181-220

9. The direct carbon dioxide effect on plants

   • Jonathan Adams

   Pages 221-260

10. Back Matter

    Pages 261-266

    PDF

This book offers a readable and accessible account of the way 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. The influence of plants (both on land and in the ocean) in making clouds, haze and rain are considered, along with plant effects on the composition of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere. Broad global feedbacks that either stabilize or destabilize the earth's environment will be explored, in the context of environmental change in the recent geological past, and in the near future. Common contentions and misconceptions about the role of vegetation or forest removal in the spread of deserts will also be considered.

• Cloud
• Earth system science
• Greenhouse gas
• Greenhouse gases
• Scale
• Vegetation-climate feedbacks
• World plant life
• environmental change
• vegetation
• economic geology

From the reviews:

"Vegetation-Climate Interaction is a wonderfully simple yet elegant treatise on how vegetation patterns are closely linked to the global environment. … The book is liberally laced with useful figures and photos that contribute greatly to making the complex topics understandable. All in all, this volume is likely to become a staple for both the vegetation and climate change communities, and for meteorologically oriented scientists. It would be a perfect primer for qualifier exams in these fields. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels." (D. F. Karnosky, CHOICE, Vol. v4 (3), November, 2007)

• Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  Jonathan Adams

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.

 

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