Succession of a natural desert vegetation community after long-term fencing at the edge of a desert oasis in northwest China.

Fencing is the most economical method of restoring degraded desert ecosystems, and plays an important role in promoting plant community diversity and productivity, as well as stable ecosystem structure and function. In this study, we selected a typical degraded desert plant community (-) on the edge of a desert oasis in the Hexi Corridor in northwest China. We then investigated succession in this plant community and corresponding changes in soil physical and chemical characteristics over 10 years of fencing restoration to analyze the mutual feedback mechanisms.

The effects of grazer exclosure duration on soil microbial communities on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.

While determining the response of soil microbes to grazer exclosure duration is critical to understanding ecosystem restoration processes, few studies have focused on this issue. With seasonal grazing as a control, microbes of alpine grassland soils under 5, 13, 22, and 39 years of grazer exclosure situated in the eastern part of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, were examined. Microbial diversity was determined through Illumina high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene and an internal transcription spacer (ITS).

Spatiotemporal variability of glacier changes and their controlling factors in the Kanchenjunga region, Himalaya based on multi-source remote sensing data from 1975 to 2015.

Spatio-temporal behavior of glaciers in the Himalayas has varied greatly in response to reported climate warming and other modulating factors such as topography, debris cover, and glacier morphology. In this paper, 429 glaciers were examined in the Kanchenjunga region in the middle of the Himalayas. Geodetic methods, feature-based image matching, and multi-parametric integrated approaches were used to detect differences of glacier change and the dominant characteristics driving these differences based on digital elevation models (DEMs), Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI images, Envisat/ASAR and Sentinel-1 data.

[Validation of vegetation coverage and NDVI based on UAV remote sensing method and its response to hydrothermal gradient].

To verify the accuracy of MODIS-NDVI data products in deserts and provide guidance for scientific management of desert grasslands in the context of climate change, we examined the responses of fractional vegetation cover (FVC) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to hydrothermal gradient in arid desert areas using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing. In Alxa desert region of Inner Mongolia, GreenSeeker handheld spectrometer was used to obtain NDVI (NDVI) of 100 sampling points. NDVI was extracted by MODIS-NDVI data products (NDVI), and the accuracy of NDVI was verified by NDVI.