Vegetation-Climate Interaction: How Plants Make the Global Environment (2009)

This book offers a readable and accessible account of the ways in which the world's plant life partly controls its own environment. Starting from the broad patterns in vegetation which have classically been seen as a passive response to climate, the authors build up from the local scale - with microclimates produced by plants - to the regional and global scale. Coverage includes the influence of plants (both on land and in the ocean) in making clouds, haze and rain, along with plant effects on the composition of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere. The book explores broad global feedbacks that either stabilize or destabilize the earth's environment, in the context of environmental change in the recent geological past, and in the near future. The book also reviews common contentions and misconceptions about the role of vegetation or forest removal in the spread of deserts.