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Arid wetlands are important for biodiversity conservation, but sensitive and vulnerable to climate variability and hydroclimatic events. Amplification of the water cycle, including the increasing frequency and severity of droughts and wet extremes, is expected to alter spatial and temporal hydrological patterns in arid wetlands globally, with potential threats to ecosystem services and their functioning. Despite these pressing challenges, the ecohydrological interactions and resilience of arid wetlands to highly variable water regimes over long time periods remain largely unknown. Recent broad-scale drought and floods over Australia provide unique opportunities to improve our understanding of arid wetland ecosystem responses to hydroclimatic extremes. Here we analysed the ecohydrological dynamics of the Coongie Lakes arid wetland in central Australia, one of the world’s largest Ramsar-designated wetlands, using more than two decades (1988–2011) of vegetation and floodwater extent retrievals derived from Landsat satellite observations. To explore the impacts of large-scale hydrological fluctuations on the arid wetland, we further coupled Landsat measurements with Total Water Storage Anomaly (TWSA) data obtained from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. Pronounced seasonal and inter-annual variabilities of flood and vegetation activities were observed over the wetland, with variations in vegetation growth extent highly correlated with flood extent (r = 0.64, p < 0.05) that ranged from nearly zero to 3456 km 2 . We reported the hydrological dynamics and associated ecosystem responses to be largely driven by the two phases (El Niño and La Niña) of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) ocean-atmosphere system. Changes in flood and vegetation extent were better explained by GRACE–TWSA (r = 0.8, lag = 0 month) than rainfall (r = 0.34, lag = 3 months) over the water source area, demonstrating that TWS is a valuable hydrological indicator for complex dryland river systems. The protracted Millennium Drought from 2001 to 2009 resulted in long-term absence of major flood events, which substantially suppressed wetland vegetation growth. However, the 2010–11 La Niña induced flooding events led to an exceptionally large resurgence of vegetation, with a mean vegetation growth extent anomaly exceeding the historical average (1988–2011) by more than 1.5 standard deviations, suggesting a significant resilience of arid wetland ecosystems to climate variability. This study showed the ecological functioning of arid wetlands is particularly sensitive to large-scale hydrological fluctuations and extreme drought conditions, and vulnerable to future altered water regimes due to climate change. The methods developed herein can be applied to arid wetlands located in other dryland river systems across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Previous studies show that the area of a moraine-dammed lake can provide a good indicator of the significance of its outburst. For a glacier-dammed lake however, because its area and depth fluctuates with the melting of its ice dam, it is difficult to predict the outburst of the glacier‐dammed lake by using its area alone. A characteristic of the surface of Lake Merzbacher is a large amount of floating ice therefore, a method is proposed in this article to extract the area of floating ice on the lake and the area of ice free water in the lake by using Environment and Disaster Monitoring Small Satellite images respectively. Furthermore, based on the area of floating ice extracted through the image information of Lake Merzbacher in 2009 and 2010, we determined the relationship between the ice area and the outburst of the lake, then formulated the Index for hazard of Glacier Lake Outburst Flood (IGLOF) of Lake Merzbacher, which cannot only predict the flood outburst, but also determine the specific outburst period after the lake drainage had occurred. This can be shown in a recalculation of the lake drainages in the years 2009 and 2010. Research results indicate that when IGLOF is less than 0.5 and the lake area is larger than 3km2, the outburst process is in early-warning period and GLOF will occur in the next 5–8days. Also, the successful outburst prediction of Lake Merzbacher in 2011 showed that the index described in this paper provides a quick methodology for forecasting and warning against Lake Merzbacher outburst floods. However，as our research was based on a short observation period (2009-2011) and also cannot be supplemented by other images, it will still be needed to be checked and validated by continuous observation and improvement in future. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract Ecosystems in arid and semi-arid regions are vulnerable to climatic and anthropogenic disturbances. However, our understanding of vegetation stability (including resistance and resilience, which are the abilities of ecosystems to resist perturbations and return to pre-disturbance structure or function, respectively) in response to environmental changes in dryland ecosystems remains insufficient, particularly in the absence of large-scale observations of water availability. Here we introduced GRACE monthly total water storage anomaly (TWSA) data into an autoregressive model with remote sensed EVI, air temperature and precipitation to investigate the short-term vegetation stability and its influencing factors in Central Asia (CA) during 2003–2015. The results showed that the grid-level vegetation resilience in CA increased logarithmically as mean annual precipitation (R2 = 0.33, P < 0.05) but decreased linearly with increasing mean annual temperature (R2 = 0.41, P < 0.05). Vegetation resilience was not correlated with TWSA, due to the decoupling of TWSA with precipitation both spatially and temporally in the majority of CA. At the biome level, vegetation resilience also increased as a logarithmical function of aridity index (R2 = 0.80, P < 0.05). Vegetation resistance to TWSA showed minor difference across biomes, while vegetation resistance to precipitation functioned as a parabolic curve along the aridity gradient (R2 = 0.59, P < 0.05). Our results suggest that accounting for the effects of total water column instead of precipitation only is critical in understanding vegetation-water relationships in drylands. The steep decrease in vegetation resilience in areas with high temperature and low water availability implies a high risk of collapse for these water-limited ecosystems if there are severe droughts. Furthermore, reduction in total water storage, induced by, e.g., large-scale extraction of surface runoff or shallow-layer groundwater for irrigation, can result in negative influences to natural biomes in dryland regions. Graphical abstract Unlabelled Image Highlights • Spatially vegetation resilience increased logarithmically with increasing mean annual precipitation or aridity index. • Vegetation resilience was not correlated with TWSA due to the decoupling of TWSA with precipitation. • Vegetation resistance to precipitation functioned nonlinearly along the aridity gradient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Realistic representations and simulation of mass and energy exchanges across heterogeneous landscapes can be a challenge in land surface and dynamic vegetation models. For mixed life-form biomes such as savannas, plant function is very difficult to parameterise due to the distinct physiological characteristics of tree and grass plant functional types (PFTs) that vary dramatically across space and time. The partitioning of their fractional contributions to ecosystem gross primary production (GPP) remains to be achieved at regional scale using remote sensing. The objective of this study was to partition savanna gross primary production (GPP) into tree and grass functional components based on their distinctive phenological characteristics. Comparison of the remote sensing partitioned GPP tree and GPP grass against field measurements from eddy covariance (EC) towers showed an overall good agreement in terms of both GPP seasonality and magnitude. We found total GPP, as well as its tree and grass components, decreased dramatically with rainfall over the North Australian Tropical Transect (NATT), from the Eucalyptus forest and woodland in the northern humid coast to the grasslands, Acacia woodlands and shrublands in the southern xeric interior. Spatially, GPP tree showed a steeper decrease with precipitation along the NATT compared to GPP grass , thus tree/grass GPP ratios also decreased from the northern mesic region to the arid south region of the NATT. However, results also showed a second trend at the southern part of the transect, where tree-grass ratios and total GPP increased with decreasing mean annual precipitation, and this occurred in the physiognomic transition from hummock grasslands to Acacia woodland savannas. Total GPP and tree-grass GPP ratios across climate extremes were found to be primarily driven by grass layer response to rainfall dynamics. The grass-containing xeric savannas exhibited a higher hydroclimatic sensitivity, whereas GPP in the northern mesic savannas was fairly stable across years despite large variations in rainfall amount. The pronounced spatiotemporal variations in savanna vegetation productivity encountered along the NATT study area suggests that the savanna biome is particularly sensitive and vulnerable to predicted future climate change and hydroclimatic variability. • Functional partition of savanna GPP into tree and grass using MODIS was achieved. • Validation of the partitioned results against flux tower data showed good agreement. • Savanna tree and grass ratio varies according to rainfall, soil, and other factors. • Seasonal & inter-annual savanna GPP and tree-grass ratio was driven by C 4 grasses. • Savanna is particularly sensitive to climate change and hydroclimatic variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]