Rapid climate change, in conjunction with other anthropogenic drivers, has the potential to cause mass species extinction. To minimize this risk, conservation reserves need to be coordinated at multiple spatial scales because the climate envelopes of many species may shift rapidly across large geographic areas. In addition, novel species assemblages and ecological reorganization make future con...

Self-organising systems adapt to environmental change, and this ability modulates the relationship between specific exposures and outcomes. Vulnerability can be thought of as the sensitivity of the system to multiple exposures, taking into account the system’s ability to adapt. This paper describes 5 causes of vulnerability to climate change in the Asia Pacific region: destructive growth, pover...

The protection of natural areas is considered an essential strategy for environment conservation. objective this work was to determine the level vulnerability, considering characterization and identification risk zones ecological Pagaibamba Protection Forest (PPF, Peru). To vulnerable areas, Landsat ETM satellite images, topographic, geological, ecological, vegetation cover maps were used. Geol...

Understanding life history and demographic variation among species within communities is a central ecological goal. Mortality schedules are especially important in ecosystems where disturbance plays a major role in structuring communities, such as coral reefs. Here, we test whether a trait-based, mechanistic model of mechanical vulnerability in corals can explain mortality schedules. Specifical...

This paper describes the research carried out within the framework of the Ecological Economical Zoning of Minas Gerais (ZEE-MG) to model vegetation vulnerability derived by a number of spatial inference methods. Methods based on weighted overlay, fuzzy logic, and neural networks were compared in terms of visual similarity between maps, the degree of restrictiveness concerning vulnerability, and...

Societies frequently generate public infrastructure and institutional arrangements in order to mediate short-term environmental fluctuations. However, the social and ecological consequences of activities directed at dealing with short-term disturbances may increase the vulnerability of the system to infrequent events or to long-term change in patterns of short-term variability. Exploring this p...

OBJECTIVES The study aimed at evaluating the contextual effects of social vulnerability over anthropometric indexes related to global and central obesity in adults living in Ribeirão Preto (SP), Brazil, in 2006. METHODS In a population-based cross-sectional study using multistage sampling, multilevel linear models were applied considering two levels: ecological and individual. The 81 census t...

A regime shift occurs when small external variations in system parameters shift the system’s state from a nominal to an alternative qualitative behavior. This paper uses robust stability margins to evaluate a kinetic system’s vulnerability to bifurcation-induced regime shifts. The results are derived for an important class of nonnegative polynomial systems defined with respect to a directed gra...

Widespread extinction is a predicted ecological consequence of global warming. Extinction risk under climate change scenarios is a function of distribution breadth. Focusing on trees and birds of the eastern United States, we used joint climate and environment models to examine fit and climate change vulnerability as a function of distribution breadth. We found that extinction vulnerability inc...

INTRODUCTION This study aimed to analyze the relationship between the incidence of severe dengue during the 2008 epidemic in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and socioeconomic indicators, as well as indicators of health service availability and previous circulation of the dengue virus serotype-3 (DENV-3). METHODS In this ecological study, the units of analysis were the districts of Rio de Janeiro. The...