Land cover changes (LCCs) play an important role in the climate system. Research over recent decades highlights the impacts of these changes on atmospheric temperature, humidity, cloud cover, circulation, and precipitation. These impacts range from the local-and regional-scale to sub-continental and global-scale. It has been found that the impacts of regional-scale LCC in one area may also be manifested in other parts of the world as a climatic teleconnection. In light of these findings, this article provides an overview and synthesis of some of the most notable types of LCC and their impacts on climate. These LCC types include agriculture, deforestation and afforestation, desertification, and urbanization. In addition, this article provides a discussion on challenges to, and future research directions in, assessing the climatic impacts of LCC.

No abstract

[1] Trends in soil temperature are important, but rarely reported, indicators of climate change. On the basis of the soil temperature data from 30 climate stations across Canada during 1958-2008, trends in soil temperatures at 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, and 150 cm depths were analyzed, together with atmospheric variables, such as air temperature, precipitation, and depth of snow on the ground, observed at the same locations. There was a significant positive trend with soil temperatures in spring and summer means, but not for the winter and annual means. A positive trend with time in soil temperature was detected at about two-thirds of the stations at all depths below 5 cm. A warming trend of 0.26-0.30°C/decade was consistently detected in spring (March-April-May) at all depths between 1958 and 2008. The warming trend in soil temperatures was associated with trends in air temperatures and snow cover depth over the same period. A significant decreasing trend in snow cover depth in winter and spring was associated with increasing air temperatures. The combined effects of the higher air temperature and reduced snow depth probably resulted in an enhanced increasing trend in spring soil temperatures, but no significant trends in winter soil temperatures. The thermal insulation by snow cover appeared to play an important role in the response of soil temperatures to climate change and must be accounted for in projecting future soil-related impacts of climate change.

Micronutrient deficiencies (MNDs) remain widespread among people in sub-Saharan Africa1–5, where access to sufficient food from plant and animal sources that is rich in micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) is limited due to socioeconomic and geographical reasons4–6. Here we report the micronutrient composition (calcium, iron, selenium and zinc) of staple cereal grains for most of the cereal production areas in Ethiopia and Malawi. We show that there is geospatial variation in the composition of micronutrients that is nutritionally important at subnational scales. Soil and environmental covariates of grain micronutrient concentrations included soil pH, soil organic matter, temperature, rainfall and topography, which were specific to micronutrient and crop type. For rural households consuming locally sourced food—including many smallholder farming communities—the location of residence can be the largest influencing factor in determining the dietary intake of micronutrients from cereals. Positive relationships between the concentration of selenium in grain and biomarkers of selenium dietary status occur in both countries. Surveillance of MNDs on the basis of biomarkers of status and dietary intakes from national- and regional-scale food-composition data1–7 could be improved using subnational data on the composition of grain micronutrients. Beyond dietary diversification, interventions to alleviate MNDs, such as food fortification8,9 and biofortification to increase the micronutrient concentrations in crops10,11, should account for geographical effects that can be larger in magnitude than intervention outcomes.

Two weather generators -LARS-WG, developed at Long Ashton Research Station (UK), and AAFC-WG, developed at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada -were compared in order to gauge their capabilities of reproducing probability distributions, means and variances of observed daily precipitation, maximum temperature and minimum temperature for diverse Canadian climates. Climatic conditions, such as wet and dry spells, interannual variability and agroclimatic indices, were also used to assess the performance of the 2 weather generators. AAFC-WG performed better in simulating temperature-related statistics, while it did almost as well as LARS-WG for statistics associated with daily precipitation. Using empirical distributions in AAFC-WG for daily maximum and minimum temperatures helped to improve the temperature statistics, especially in cases where local temperatures did not follow normal distributions. However, both weather generators had overdispersion problems, i.e. they underestimated interannual variability, especially for temperatures. Overall, AAFC-WG performed better.