Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Research Articles

Local surface warming assessment in response to vegetation shifts over arid lands of Central Asia (2001−2020)

The Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) was established to address the large-scale environmental change across this region. Regardless of the increasingly insightful literature addressing vegetation change across Central Asia, the biogeophysical warming effects of vegetation shifts still need to be clarified. To contribute, the utility of robust satellite observation is explored to evaluate the surface warming effects of vegetation shifts across Central Asia, which is among NEEPSI's hotspots. We estimated an average increase of +1.9 °C in daytime local surface temperature and + 1.5 °C in the nighttime due to vegetation shift (2001–2020). Meanwhile, the mean local latent heat increased by 4.65Wm−2, following the mild reduction of emitted longwave radiation (−0.8Wm−2). We found that vegetation shifts led to local surface warming with a bright surface, noting that the average air surface temperature was revealed to have increased significantly (2001–2020). This signal was driven mainly by agricultural expansion in western Kazakhstan stretching to Tajikistan and Xinjiang, then deforestation confined in Tajikistan, southeast Kazakhstan, and the northwestern edge of Xinjiang, and finally, grassland encroachment occurred massively in the west to central Kazakhstan. These findings address the latest information on Central Asia's vegetation shifts that may be substantial in landscape change mitigation plans.

Current Status and Future Earth System Studies in Northern Eurasia

Northern Eurasia is a sensitive and rapidly changing area with the signal of climate change effects already observed in many components of the Earth's system. The ongoing warming in the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) domain was substantially larger than for the globe and during the past 50 years, with a rate of the annual temperature increase of 0.33°C per decade. In addition, this region experienced impacts of abrupt institutional and economic changes in the former Soviet Union countries, east Europe, Mongolia, and China.

Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative: evolution of scientific investigations to applicable science

The letters collected in this focus issue of Environmental Research Letters on ‘Environmental, socio-economic and climatic changes in Northern Eurasia and their feedbacks to the global Earth system’ represent the third special issue based on the results of research within the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI: http://neespi.org) program domain. Through the years, NEESPI researchers have presented a diverse array of articles that represent a variety of spatial scales and demonstrate the degree to which abrupt climatic and socio-economic changes are acting across Northern Eurasia and feed back to the global Earth system.

Understanding origins and impacts of drought

Impacts of Extreme Weather on Natural, Socio‐economic, and Land‐Use Systems:Focus on the 2010 Summer Anomaly in the Volga Region;Yoshkar‐Ola, Russia, 17–21 June 2012 In the summer of 2010 an extreme drought captured the attention of the media, the Russian government, and the international community. This drought resulted in widespread crop failure within one of the largest wheat‐exporting regions of the world, leading to global grain price hikes. A joint NASA, Global Observations of Forest and Land Cover Dynamics (GOFC‐GOLD), and Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) meeting at the Volga State University of Technology, held 2 years after the 2010 drought, provided for a wide‐ranging and in‐depth review of recent research on the drought and its impacts on ecosystems and society and drew participants from the United States, Europe, Russia, and Kazakhstan.

The Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership: An Example of Science Applied to Societal Needs

Abstract Northern Eurasia, the largest land-mass in the northern extratropics, accounts for ∼20% of the global land area. However, little is known about how the biogeochemical cycles, energy and water cycles, and human activities specific to this carbon-rich, cold region interact with global climate. A major concern is that changes in the distribution of land-based life, as well as its interactions with the environment, may lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of accelerated regional and global warming. With this as its motivation, the Northern Eurasian Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) was formed in 2004 to better understand and quantify feedbacks between northern Eurasian and global climates. The first group of NEESPI projects has mostly focused on assembling regional databases, organizing improved environmental monitoring of the region, and studying individual environmental processes. That was a starting point to addressing emerging challenges in the region related to rapidly and simultaneously...

Northern Eurasia in the global Earth system

Northern Eurasia is undergoing significant changes associated with warming climate and with socioeconomic changes during the entire twentieth century. Climatic changes over this vast landmass interact and affect the rate of global change through atmospheric circulation and through strong biogeophysical and biogeochemical couplings. Current and future interactions and feedbacks to the global system of this carbon‐ rich, cold‐region component of the Earth system remain to a large extent unknown.The Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI; http://neespi.org), an international and interdisciplinary program, was established to address these issues. NEESPI's overarching science question is, How do we develop our predictive capability of terrestrial ecosystems dynamics over northern Eurasia for the 21st century to support global projections as well as informed decision‐making and numerous practical applications in the region? Since 2004, more than 100 international research projects have joined NEESPI, and the initiative has been endorsed by several international programs and projects.

Contribution of the NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use Change Program to the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative: An overview

The Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) is a rapidly growing program that involves national government agencies, academia and private organizations in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Northern Eurasia. During the last decade the Northern Eurasian region have been undergoing socioeconomic, climatic and demographic changes. The causes of these changes, the associated interactions between the land surface, the atmosphere and the surrounding ocean and the resultant impact on the sustainability of land use of the region are important topics for scientific research. The NEESPI Science Plan has been prepared as an integrated regional study to better understand these hemispheric-scale interactions, to evaluate the combined role of climate and anthropogenic impacts on the Northern Eurasia ecosystems, and to assess how future human actions would affect the global climate and ecosystems of the region. Projections of the consequence of global changes on the regional environment, the economy and the quality of life in Northern Eurasia that is of primary importance to the nations in the region is an additional focus of this initiative. The NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use Change (LCLUC) Program has supported NEESPI since its inception, and currently funds 26 NEESPI projects. Several other NASA programs are also currently supporting or planning to support the NEESPI. The NEESPI program links to the major international programs under the Earth System Science Partnership (IGBP, IHDP, DIVERSITAS and WCRP) and under the Global Terrestrial Observing System, such as the Global Observation of Forest Cover/Global Observation of Landcover Dynamics (GOFC/GOLD). A number of the NEESPI science activities are aligned with the Global Earth System of Systems (GEOSS) objectives, giving an emphasis to societal benefits, so that the NEESPI framework can serve as a regional test bed for international cooperation in developing a system of observational systems. Since it is a new program, most of the NEESPI research projects have just started. Therefore, rather than describing these projects this paper focuses on presenting some results of the longer term projects which are being continued under NEESPI, and on the expected products from the program and its future directions. More information on the projects can be found at http://neespi.org or http://lcluc.hq.nasa.gov.