[1] Evidence is mounting that abrupt climatic shifts occurred during the last glacial-interglacial transition (LGIT) in the North Atlantic and other regions. However, few high-resolution climatic records of the LGIT exist from the high latitudes of the North Pacific rim. We analyzed lake sediments from southwestern Alaska for biogenic silica, organic carbon, organic nitrogen, diatom assemblages...

Accurate detection and quantification of vegetation dynamics and drivers of observed climatic and anthropogenic change in space and time is fundamental for our understanding of the atmosphere–biosphere interactions at local and global scales. This case study examined the coupled spatial patterns of vegetation dynamics and climatic variabilities during the past three decades in the Upper Heihe R...

Understanding patterns of plant population mortality during extreme weather events is important to conservation planners because the frequency of such events is expected to increase, creating the need to integrate climatic uncertainty into management. Dominant plants provide habitat and ecosystem structure, so changes in their distribution can be expected to have cascading effects on entire com...

Rapid climate change jeopardizes tree populations by shifting current climate zones. To avoid extinction, tree populations must tolerate, adapt, or migrate. Here we investigate geographic patterns of genetic variation in valley oak, Quercus lobata Née, to assess how underlying genetic structure of populations might influence this species' ability to survive climate change. First, to understand ...

Vegetation mapping based on niche theory has proven useful in understanding the rules governing species assembly at various spatial scales. Remote-sensing derived distribution maps depicting occurrences of target species are frequently based on biophysical and biochemical properties of species. However, environmental conditions, such as climatic variables, also affect spectral signals simultane...

Identifying the potentially suitable climatic geographical range for Liriodendron chinense (L. chinense) and predicting its responses to climate change is urgently necessary, as L. chinense is an important tertiary relict tree species. In this study, we simulated the potentially suitable climatic habitat of L. chinense in China using maximum entropy (MaxEnt) modeling. We found that the MaxEnt m...