An accessible account of the ways in which the world's plant life affects the climate. It covers everything from tiny local microclimates created by plants to their effect on a global scale. If you’ve ever wondered how vegetation can create clouds, haze and rain, or how plants have an impact on the composition of greenhouse gases, then this book is required reading.

Correlation between plant distribution and climate is examined over different time and space scales to determine the mechanisms of control in physiological and biochemical terms.

An illustrated overview of the sustainability of natural resources and the social and environmental issues surrounding their distribution and demand.

Today's greater public awareness of how climate affects our quality of life and environment has created an increasing demand for climatological information. Now this information is available in one convenient, accessible source, The Encyclopedia of Climatology. This comprehensive volume covers all the main subfields of climatology, supplies data on climates in major continental areas and explains what is known about the causes of climatic processes and changes. Contents include articles on bioclimatology, El Niño, climatic models, world regional climates, civilization and climate, climatic variations and the greenhouse effect.

This book will provide a complete overview of an alpine ecosystem, based on the long-term research conducted at the Niwot Ridge LTER. There is, at present, no general book on alpine ecology. The alpine ecosystem features conditions near the limits of biological existence, and is a useful laboratory for asking more general ecological questions, because it offers large environmental change over relatively short distances. Factors such as macroclimate, microclimate, soil conditions, biota, and various biological factors change on differing scales, allowing insight into the relative contributions of the different factors on ecological outcomes.

This study arose out ofthe old question of what actually determines vegetation structure and distributions. Is climate the overriding control, as one would suppose from reading the more geographically oriented literature? Or is climate only incidental, as suggested by more site and/ or taxon-oriented writers? The question might be phrased more realistically: How much does climate control vegetation processes, structures, and distributions? It seemed to me, as an ambitious doctoral student, that one way to attempt an answer might be to try to predict world vegetation from climate alone and then compare the predicted results with actual vegetation patterns. If climatic data were sufficient to reproduce the world's actual vegetation patterns, then one could conclude that climate is the main control. This book represents an expanded, second-generation version of that original thesis. It presents world-scale vegetation and ecoclimatic models and a methodology for applying such models to predict vegetation and for evaluating model results. This approach also provides a means of geographical simulation of vegetation patterns and changes, which represent necessary data inputs in other fields such as atmospheric chemistry and biogeochemical cycling. It has been fairly well accepted that climatic and other environmental conditions are associated with the evolution of particular aspects of plant form (convergent evolution). The particular configurations of plant size, photosynthetic surface area and structure (e. g. sclerophylly, stomatal 'resistance'), and their seasonal variations represent what one can recognize fairly readily as distinct growth forms.