The Tibetan Plateau is a key area for research on global environmental changes. During the past 50 years, the climate in the Siling Co lake area has become continuously warmer and wetter, which may have further caused the increase in Siling Co lake area. Based on the Siling Co lake area (2003 to 2013) and climate data acquired from the Xainza and Baingoin meteorological stations (covering 1966 ...

Investigating past interglacial climates not only help to understand how the climate system operates in general, it also forms a vital basis for climate predictions. We reconstructed vertical stratification changes in temperature and salinity in the North Atlantic for a period some 400 ka ago (MIS11), an interglacial time analogue of a future climate. As inferred from a unique set of biogeochem...

Parasites typically have broader thermal limits than hosts, so large performance gaps between pathogens and their cold- and warm-adapted hosts should occur at relatively warm and cold temperatures, respectively. We tested this thermal mismatch hypothesis by quantifying the temperature-dependent susceptibility of cold- and warm-adapted amphibian species to the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium de...

Climate change will likely have profound effects on cold-water species of freshwater fishes. As temperatures rise, cold-water fish distributions may shift and contract in response. Predicting the effects of projected stream warming in stream networks is complicated by the generally poor correlation between water temperature and air temperature. Spatial dependencies in stream networks are comple...

This article presents snow hydrology updates made to iTree-Hydro, previously called the Urban Forest Effects—Hydrology model. iTree-Hydro Version 1 was a warm climate model developed by the USDA Forest Service to provide a process-based planning tool with robust water quantity and quality predictions given data limitations common to most urban areas. Cold climate hydrology routines presented in...

Whether climate change will turn cold biomes from large long-term carbon sinks into sources is hotly debated because of the great potential for ecosystem-mediated feedbacks to global climate. Critical are the direction, magnitude and generality of climate responses of plant litter decomposition. Here, we present the first quantitative analysis of the major climate-change-related drivers of litt...

Global change is disproportionately affecting cold environments (polar and high elevation regions), with potentially negative impacts on microbial diversity and functional processes. In most cold environments the combination of low temperatures, and physical stressors, such as katabatic wind episodes and limited water availability result in biotic systems, which are in trophic terms very simple...

Wild pigs (Sus scrofa), also known as wild swine, feral pigs, or feral hogs, are one of the most widespread and successful invasive species around the world. Wild pigs have been linked to extensive and costly agricultural damage and present a serious threat to plant and animal communities due to their rooting behavior and omnivorous diet. We modeled the current distribution of wild pigs in the ...

This paper discusses results of a simulation with the regional climate model HIRHAM for 1958-2001, driven by the ECMWF reanalysis (ERA40) data over the Arctic domain. The aim is to analyze the ability of the model to capture certain features of climate extremes derived from daily mean, maximum and minimum temperatures. For this purpose, a range of climate indices (frost days, cold and warm spel...

Oil and gas offshore exploration drilling and production facilities in cold climate and Arctic environmental conditions need various design considerations and operational preparation for intended operations. Offshore winterization of drilling systems and equipment is considered to be one of the essential aspects for ensuring that a facility is capable of and suitably prepared for operations in ...