The alpine treeline is commonly regarded as being sensitive to climatic warming because regeneration and growth of trees at treeline generally are limited by low temperature. The alpine treelines of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) occur at the highest elevations (4,900 m above sea level) in the Northern Hemisphere. Ongoing climatic warming is expected to shift treelines upward. Studies of treeline dyn...

Intact Forest Landscape (IFL) is of great value in protecting biodiversity and supporting core ecological processes. It is important to analyze the spatial variation in the growth dynamics of IFL. This study analyzed the change of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) during the growing season (April–October) for boreal (45 ̋ N–70 ̋ N) IFLs and the correlation with climatic variables ...

Leptospirosis is a widespread although recently neglected zoonosis recognized worldwide. The disease seems to be underestimated, especially in countries located in the temperate climatic zone. The presented article concerns the main characteristics of leptospirosis and describes formerly known and recently observed environmental, occupational and recreational risk factors significant in the spr...

The effects of Quaternary climatic oscillations on the demography of organisms vary across regions and continents. In taxa distributed in Europe and North America, several paradigms regarding the distribution of refugia have been identified. By contrast, less is known about the processes that shaped the species' spatial genetic structure in areas such as the Himalayas, which is considered a bio...

Many studies have demonstrated influences of climatic variation on a variety of ecological processes, however, its impact on the potent evolutionary force of sexual selection has largely been ignored. The intensity of sexual selection is a fundamental parameter in animal populations, which depends upon the degree of polygamy and will probably be influenced by the impact of local climatic variat...

This manuscript proposes an interesting idea of relating dynamical indicators for atmospheric mixing with regional precipitation. By performing a correlation analysis between seasonally averaged summer-time finite-time Lyapunov exponents, winter precipitation and several teleconnection indices, they establish statistical linkages between these variables, which could be further associated with c...

Non-deforestation fire – i.e., fire that is typically followed by the recovery of natural vegetation – is arguably the most influential disturbance in terrestrial ecosystems, thereby playing a major role in carbon exchanges and affecting many climatic processes. The radiative effect from a given atmospheric CO2 perturbation is the same for fire and fossil fuel combustion. However, major differe...

There is scientific agreement in the latest report from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): anthropogenic climate change is already occurring and even if greenhouse gas concentrations are stabilised, global warming and sea level rises will continue for centuries – the result of climatic processes and feedbacks (Solomon et al., 2007). These changes in the Earth’s physical syst...

Partitioning of rainfall into evapotranspiration and runoff is controlled by climate and catchment characteristics. The degree of control exerted by these factors varies with the spatial and temporal scales of processes being modelled. Understanding individual hydrological processes and their relationships with climatic and catchment characteristics is an important step in predicting catchment ...