Claus Beier,* Carl Beierkuhnlein, Thomas Wohlgemuth, Josep Penuelas, Bridget Emmett, Christian Körner, Hans de Boeck, Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen, Sebastian Leuzinger Ivan A. Janssens and Karin Hansen Abstract Climatic changes, including altered precipitation regimes, will affect key ecosystem processes, such as plant productivity and biodiversity for many terrestrial ecosystems. Past and ongo...

Drought is an intermittent disturbance of the water cycle that profoundly affects the terrestrial carbon cycle. However, the response of the coupled water and carbon cycles to drought and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here we provide the first global synthesis of the drought effect on ecosystem water use efficiency (WUE = gross primary production (GPP)/evapotranspiration (ET)). Usin...

—In modern ecosystems, regions of topographic heterogeneity, when compared with nearby topographically homogeneous regions, support high species densities of mammals and other groups. This biogeographic pattern could be explained by either greater diversification rates or greater accommodation of species in topographically complex regions. In this context, we assess the hypothesis that changes ...

Fire is a key ecological process affecting vegetation dynamics and land cover. The characteristic frequency, size, and intensity of fire are driven by interactions between top-down climate-driven and bottom-up fuel-related processes. Disentangling climatic from non-climatic drivers of past fire regimes is a grand challenge in Earth systems science, and a topic where both paleoecology and ecolog...

As chemical weathering of silicate rocks acts as a sink for atmospheric CO2 and as greenhouse effect gases such as CO2 have a leading role in climate regulation, much of river geochemical studies now focus on chemical and mechanical riverine erosion and on their controlling parameters. Moreover, weathering has probably had a dominating influence in the climatic evolution of the Earth, and studi...

Recent studies have shown that the population dynamics of deep-sea organisms are affected by coupling between surface oceanic processes and energy, or trophic resources, reaching the sea floor. I analysed the correlation between the landings of a deep-sea shrimp (Aristeus antennatus) in Catalonia (NW Mediterranean) and the climatic indices of the annual North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and wint...

Despite much progress, many questions remain regarding the potential dynamic coupling between atmospheric and lithospheric processes in the long-term evolution of mountain belts. As a complement to recent efforts to discover the interrelationships among climate, topography, erosion, and rock deformation under conditions of mass-flux steady state, we explore orogen response to changes in climate...

This research extends upon land cover change studies by incorporating methodological approaches, which are compatible with heterogeneous ecosystems, are able to link landscape changes to system processes, such as climate change, and provide potential linkages to concepts of ecological resilience. The study region in southern Africa experienced a significant climatic shift in the 1970s, resultin...

A new survey of Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) narrow-angle images of gullies in the 30◦–45◦ S latitude band includes their distribution, morphology, local topographic setting, orientation, elevation, and slopes. These new data show that gully formation is favored over a specific range of conditions: elevation (−5000 to +3000 m), slope (>10◦), and orientation (83.8% on pole-facing slopes). These dat...