Recent speciation research has generally focused on how lineages that originate in allopatry evolve intrinsic reproductive isolation, or how ecological divergence promotes nonallopatric speciation. However, the ecological basis of allopatric isolation, which underlies the most common geographic mode of speciation, remains poorly understood and largely unstudied. Here, we explore the ecological ...

Inferences of past climatic conditions from a sedimentary record from Big Lake, British Columbia, Canada, over the past 5,500 years show strong millennial-scale patterns, which oscillate between periods of wet and drier climatic conditions. Higher frequency decadal- to centennial-scale fluctuations also occur within the dominant millennial-scale patterns. These changes in climatic conditions ar...

Mountainous regions offer not only essential habitat and resources, including water, to the earth's more than 6 billion inhabitants, but also insights into how the global human habitat works, how it is being changed at the moment as global climates are disrupted, and how the disruption may lead to global biotic and economic impoverishment. At least 600 million of the earth's more than 6 billion...

Climate change is expected to force many species in arctic regions to migrate and track their climatic niche. This requires recruitment from seed, which currently shows very low rates in arctic regions, where long-lived and vegetatively reproducing plants dominate. Therefore, we pose the question whether recruitment (germination and seedling establishment) in arctic regions will significantly i...

Pest Risk Assessments (PRAs) routinely employ climatic niche models to identify endangered areas. Typically, these models consider only climatic factors, ignoring the 'Swiss Cheese' nature of species ranges due to the interplay of climatic and habitat factors. As part of a PRA conducted for the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization, we developed a climatic niche model for Par...

Predicting how migratory animals respond to changing climatic conditions requires knowledge of how climatic events affect each phase of the annual cycle and how those effects carry-over to subsequent phases. We utilized a 17-year migration dataset to examine how El Niño-Southern Oscillation climatic events in geographically different regions of the Western hemisphere carry-over to impact the st...

BACKGROUND In this study, we aim to identify key climatic factors that are associated with the transmission of Japanese encephalitis virus in areas located near the Three Gorges Dam, between 1997 and 2008. METHODS We identified three geographical regions of Chongqing, based on their distance from the Three Gorges Dam. Collectively, the three regions consisted of 12 districts from which study ...

Tourism is one of the most important economic sectors in Croatia. The Adriatic coast is a popular travel destination for tourists, especially during the summer months. During their activities, tourists are affected by atmospheric conditions and therefore by weather and climate. Therefore, it is important to have reliable information about thermal conditions as well as their impacts on human bei...