The researchers found that substantial vegetation-precipitation feedback loops often occur in semi-arid or monsoonal regions, in effect hotspots that are transitional between energy and water limitation.
Improvements were more significant in southern and central regions, while in northern regions, where the drought has been more severe, the recovery was less substantial and vegetation conditions remained below average in some areas.
The phenomenon is especially pronounced in Siberia and eastern Russia, they found, where almost two-thirds of the vegetated areas above 40° north latitude (the level of New York City) show substantial increases in vegetation density over the 18-year period, compared with about 30% of such areas in North America, which has been warming up at a lower rate.
Notable aspects of this growth include the substantial increase in vegetation and water bodies, and the unprecedented rate of construction of offshore islands.
Pollen records from Lake Malawi, Africa spanning the last 135 kyr show substantial and abrupt vegetation response to multiple episodes of extreme aridity between 135 and 75 ka.
Accordingly, while bouldering in these remote sites may not be a major threat presently, the clear impact strongly suggests that even moderate increases in bouldering activity will have a substantial impact on vegetation.
In semiarid savannas of Southern Africa current land use practices and climate change may lead to substantial changes of vegetation structure in the near future, however uncertainty remains about the potential consequences and the magnitude of change.
Projected climate change will result in a substantial shift in vegetation distribution and will affect distribution and the timing of both pests and pollinators, as well [47, 48].
For training and calibration we use the CMP-base facade database (Radim Tyleček 2013) consisting of 387 rectified images of planar facades without substantial occlusion by vegetation or man-made objects.
As mentioned earlier in this paper, models predict substantial shifts of vegetation to the north with forest steppe and steppe expected to be dominant across large southern territories of the present forest zone (Schaphoff et al. 2006; Tchebakova and Parfenova 2012).
