Abstract. A brief overview of the ongoing climatic and environmental changes in Northern Eurasia serves as an editorial introduction to this, the second, special Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) focus issue of Environmental Research Letters. Climatic changes in Northern Eurasia over the last hundred years are reflected in numerous atmospheric and terrestrial variables. Many of these are noticeably significant above the confidence level for 'weather' or other (fire regime, ecosystem change) noise and thus should be further investigated in order to adapt to their impacts. In this focus issue, we introduce assorted studies of different aspects of contemporary change in Northern Eurasia. Most of these have been presented at one of the NEESPI workshops (for more information see neespi.org) and/or American Geophysical Union and European Geosciences Union NEESPI open sessions during the past year. These studies are diverse, representing the diversity of climates and ecosystems across Northern Eurasia. Some of these are focused on smaller spatial scales and/or address only specific aspects of the global change implications across the subcontinent. But the feeling (and observational evidence) that these changes have already been quite rapid and can have global implications inspires us to bring this suite of papers to the readers' attention.

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Focus on Climatic and Environmental Change in Northern Eurasia Contents

A bio-optical algorithm for the remote estimation of the chlorophyll-a concentration in case 2 waters
Anatoly A Gitelson, Daniela Gurlin, Wesley J Moses and Tadd Barrow

Spatial and temporal patterns of greenness on the Yamal Peninsula, Russia: interactions of ecological and social factors affecting the Arctic normalized difference vegetation index
D A Walker, M O Leibman, H E Epstein, B C Forbes, U S Bhatt, M K Raynolds, J C Comiso, A A Gubarkov, A V Khomutov, G J Jia, E Kaarlejarvi, J O Kaplan, T Kumpula, P Kuss, G Matyshak, N G Moskalenko, P Orekhov, V E Romanovsky, N G Ukraientseva and Q Yu

Estimation of chlorophyll-a concentration in case II waters using MODIS and MERIS data—successes and challenges
W J Moses, A A Gitelson, S Berdnikov and V Povazhnyy

Climate change in Inner Mongolia from 1955 to 2005—trends at regional, biome and local scales
N Lu, B Wilske, J Ni, R John and J Chen

Effects of climatic changes on carbon dioxide and water vapor fluxes in boreal forest ecosystems of European part of Russia
A Olchev, E Novenko, O Desherevskaya, K Krasnorutskaya and J Kurbatova

Comparison and evaluation of gridded radiation products across northern Eurasia
T J Troy and E F Wood

Groundwater storage changes in arctic permafrost watersheds from GRACE and in situ measurements
Reginald R Muskett and Vladimir E Romanovsky

Land cover/land use change in semi-arid Inner Mongolia: 1992–2004
Ranjeet John, Jiquan Chen, Nan Lu and Burkhard Wilske

Diagnosis of the record discharge of Arctic-draining Eurasian rivers in 2007
Michael A Rawlins, Mark C Serreze, Ronny Schroeder, Xiangdong Zhang and Kyle C McDonald

Dual scale trend analysis for evaluating climatic and anthropogenic effects on the vegetated land surface in Russia and Kazakhstan
K M de Beurs, C K Wright and G M Henebry

The effects of climate, permafrost and fire on vegetation change in Siberia in a changing climate
N M Tchebakova, E Parfenova and A J Soja

An image-based inventory of the spatial structure of West Siberian wetlands
A Peregon, S Maksyutov and Y Yamagata

Record Russian river discharge in 2007 and the limits of analysis
A I Shiklomanov and R B Lammers

Paleoclimatic reconstructions for the south of Valdai Hills (European Russia) as paleo-analogs of possible regional vegetation changes under global warming
E Novenko, A Olchev, O Desherevskaya and I Zuganova

Application of the Snowmelt Runoff model in the Kuban river basin using MODIS satellite images
M V Georgievsky

Change and persistence in land surface phenologies of the Don and Dnieper river basins
V Kovalskyy and G M Henebry

Feedbacks of windthrow for Norway spruce and Scots pine stands under changing climate
O Panferov, C Doering, E Rauch, A Sogachev and B Ahrends

Reanalysis data underestimate significant changes in growing season weather in Kazakhstan
C K Wright, K M de Beurs, Z K Akhmadieva, P Y Groisman and G M Henebry

The influence of regional surface soil moisture anomalies on forest fires in Siberia observed from satellites
A Bartsch, H Balzter and C George

Modeling of the carbon dioxide fluxes in European Russia peat bogs
J Kurbatova, C Li, F Tatarinov, A Varlagin, N Shalukhina and A Olchev

Possible decline of the carbon sink in the Mongolian Plateau during the 21st century
Y Lu, Q Zhuang, G Zhou, A Sirin, J Melillo and D Kicklighter

Evaluating the sensitivity of Eurasian forest biomass to climate change using a dynamic vegetation model
J K Shuman and H H Shugart

This focus issue is not yet complete, there are still letters at press and in review.