Land-surface changes

What are the possible consequences of the impact of land surface changes on the environment, socio-economic development, and human health ... 

Chapin 111, F.S. et al., 2005 Role of Land-Surface Changes in Arctic Summer Warming , in Science, 310 657-660. 

The complexities of land surface response and runoff generation have also presented a major obstacle to global climate modelers. Hydrologic response is linked to several important climate feedbacks (see Section 6.4.2), so imtil the hydro-logic cycle, and in particular its land surface component, can be accurately represented, there is little hope for accurate assessments of global change. 

Five components of the hydrosphere play major roles in climate feedbacks - atmospheric moisture, clouds, snow and ice, land surface, and oceans. Changes to the hydrologic cycle, among other things, as a result of altered climate conditions are then referred to as responses. Interactions with climate can best be explored by examirung potential response to a climate perturbation, in this case, predicted global warming. 

Figure 6. Mass fraction of theoretical contaminant mass remaining vs. time for various values of the hydrodynamic dispersivity, a. Atmospheric pressure changes at land surface cause advective subsurface air flow, increasing dispersivity which significantly affects the rate at which volatile contaminants escape from a layer. Reprinted from Auer et al. (1996), Copyright 1996, pg. 157, with permission from Elsevier Science.

From the estimates of Stoll-Kleemann and O Riordan (2004), about 70% of the land surface are anthropogenically affected causing changes in biodiversity thousands of times faster than would take place naturally. Global biodiversity cannot be maintained without changing the strategy of human behaviour in the sphere of environmental protection. Therefore, we should expect a crisis in biodiversity, unless international cooperation toward its protection becomes effective. 

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