Despite considerable interest in recent years on species distribution modeling and phylogenetic niche conservatism, little is known about the way in which climatic niches change over evolutionary time. This knowledge is of major importance to understand the mechanisms underlying limits of species distributions, as well as to infer how different lineages might be affected by anthropogenic climat...

The evolution of climatic niche specialization has important implications for many topics in ecology, evolution and conservation. The climatic niche reflects the set of temperature and precipitation conditions where a species can occur. Thus, specialization to a limited set of climatic conditions can be important for understanding patterns of biogeography, species richness, community structure,...

The Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, is capable of transmitting a broad range of viruses to humans. Since its introduction at the end of the 20th century, it has become well established in large parts of southern Europe. As future expansion as a result of climate change can be expected, determining the current and projected future climatic suitability of this invasive mosquito in Europe ...

OBJECTIVE The global resurgence of dengue has been attributed to rapid population growth, urban expansion, increased air travel, globalization, and climate change. Dengue is now endemic in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is at risk for Zika, another emerging arbovirus. The interrelationship between climatic, ecological, social, and cultural factors that affect dengue and other arboviruses' transmissio...

In the present work, we use an exceptional database including 5,359 records of 101 species of Oman's terrestrial reptiles together with spatial tools to infer the spatial patterns of species richness and endemicity, to infer the habitat preference of each species and to better define conservation priorities, with especial focus on the effectiveness of the protected areas in preserving this uniq...

Climatic mapping, which predicts the potential distribution of organisms in new areas and under future climates based on their responses to climate in their home range, has recently been criticised for ignoring dispersal and interactions between species, such as competition, predation and parasitism. In order to determine whether these criticisms are justified, the different procedures employed...

A knowledge-based system is presented that has been developed to be used as an advisor in the preliminary design stage of HVAC systems. It enables designers to configure and size HVAC equipment for different climatic conditions, in terms of building type, indoor requirements, outdoor and indoor air pollution. A new approach has been used in building the system, using a modified knowledge engine...