Large soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks in alpine tundra play a critical role in the global carbon budget but are increasingly vulnerable to loss under climate warming. These losses are partly driven by vegetation shifts, such as the upward migration of herbaceous plants, which alter soil food web structure and influence SOC sequestration. Although interactive effects between these processes are expected, they remain largely un...

Spatiotemporal changes in wet and dry spells had significantly contributed to climate‐related natural hazards in East Asia, especially in river basins undergoing warming. However, few studies have systematically analysed these changes for river basins at different latitudes. Herein, we investigated the observed and projected variations in wet and dry spells for East Asian river basins at different latitudes. We found that rive...

Precipitation extremes occurring on consecutive days may be of crucial importance for the formation of extensive and long‐lasting flooding. Changes in such consecutive extreme precipitation (CEP) events between different regions (i.e., dry and wet regions) still remain unclear in China, which may result in different impacts on human livelihoods and ecosystems. Here, the changes in CEP frequency between dry and wet regions of C...

Interday temperature fluctuations (ITFs) have a series of direct and visible impacts on human productivity, daily life, and some rapidly occurring processes in the Earth's critical zones. The Loess Plateau of China (LPC) is characterized by Chinese continental monsoon climate and fragile ecological environment, and thus, is sensitive to ITFs. To evaluate the spatiotemporal distribution of the ITF frequency and level, and the r...

This study investigated the recent and future spatiotemporal changes in summer hot days (HDs) and heat waves (HWs) and their relationships with large‐scale atmospheric circulations over Northeast China (NEC). We used daily maximum temperature data from 109 meteorological stations for the period 1961–2013 across NEC and the output of 11 general circulation models from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 under RCP4.5 a...

Using the daily precipitation records during 1961–2013 from 686 meteorological stations across China and the atmospheric circulation indexes, this study investigates the spatio‐temporal changes in the occurrence time and length of the extreme precipitation period (EPP), as well as their influencing factors. The results show the following aspects: (1) In the last 53 years, the start dates of the extreme precipitation period (EP...

Treeline responses to environmental changes describe an important phenomenon in global change research. Often conflicting results and generally too short observations are, however, still challenging our understanding of climate‐induced treeline dynamics. Here, we use a state‐of‐the‐art dendroecological approach to reconstruct long‐term changes in the position of the alpine treeline in relation to air temperature at two sides i...

On the basis of the daily minimum temperature, records of 109 meteorological stations over Northeastern China ( NEC ) from 1961 to 2013 and the output data of eight models from CMIP5 , this study investigates the recent and future spatiotemporal changes of the frost‐free season. The results show that the date of last spring frost ( LSFD ) has a significant decreasing trend. Stations exhibiting significant negative trends are m...

Land‐use and land‐cover change ( LUCC , such as the conversion of natural landscape to agricultural land) and human activities ( HAs ) are the most important human influences ( HIs ) on regional climate. Studying such influences is fundamental to understanding anthropogenic climate change. Our objectives were to quantify contributions of HI on regional temperature change and demonstrate that HI may cause abrupt climate change....