The global occurrence of parabolic dunes and their reactivation potential make them significant features in the present landscape. Several studies have assessed distribution structure relationship to local climate factors with aim constrain processes influencing activation reactivation. However, none addressed connection between recently active inland climatic conditions at a scale, nor as prox...

Based on the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and copula function, this study analyzed meteorological drought in upper Minjiang River basin. The Tyson polygon method is used to divide research area into four regions based stations. monthly precipitation data of stations from 1966 2016 were for calculation SPI. change trend SPI1, SPI3 SPI12 showed historical dry-wet evolution phenomenon sh...

Abstract Archaeologists and palaeoclimatologists have focused on the impact of climate prehistoric civilizations around world; however, social resilience in face change remains unclear, especially during Neolithic Bronze Age Central Plains China (CPC). In this paper, we present palynological results from Dahecun Core, Henan Province, China. Our pollen data indicate a warm wet condition 9200 to ...

The deserts of southwestern North America have undergone dramatic changes over their recent geological history including large changes in size and connectivity during the Pleistocene glaciopluvial cycles. This study examines the population history of the rare spider Saltonia incerta, once thought to be extinct, to determine the role of past climatological events in shaping the structure of the ...

The dynamics of ecosystem collapse are fundamental to determining how and why biological communities change through time, as well as the potential effects of extinctions on ecosystems. Here, we integrate depictions of mammals from Egyptian antiquity with direct lines of paleontological and archeological evidence to infer local extinctions and community dynamics over a 6,000-y span. The unpreced...

During the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), Western North America experienced episodes of intense aridity that persisted for multiple decades or longer. These megadroughts are well documented in many proxy records, but the causal mechanisms are poorly understood. General circulation models (GCMs) simulate megadroughts, but do not reproduce the temporal clustering of events during the MCA, sugges...

Fire may have been a crucial component in the evolution of the Cape flora of South Africa, a region characterized by outstanding levels of species richness and endemism. However, there is, to date, no critical assessment of the age of the modern fire regime in this biome. Here, we exploit the presence of two obligate post-fire flowering clades in the orchid genus Disa, in conjunction with a rob...

The exceptionally high plant diversity of the Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR) comprises a combination of ancient lineages and young radiations. A previous phylogenetic study of Aizoaceae subfamily Ruschioideae dated the radiation of this clade of > 1500 species in the GCFR to 3.8-8.7 Mya, establishing it as a flagship example of a diversification event triggered by the onset of a summer-ar...

Understanding the diversification of biological lineages is central to evolutionary studies. To properly study the process of speciation, it is necessary to link micro-evolutionary studies with macro-evolutionary mechanisms. Micro-evolutionary studies require proper sampling across a taxon's range to adequately infer genetic diversity. Here we use the grass frogs of the genus Ptychadena from th...

Understanding the factors that shape current species diversity is a fundamental aim of ecology and evolutionary biology. The Australian Wet Tropics (AWT) are a system in which much is known about how the rainforests and the rainforest-dependent organisms reacted to late Pleistocene climate changes, but less is known about how events deeper in time shaped speciation and extinction in this highly...