[1] Tropical montane cloud forests are ecosystems intrinsically linked to a narrow range of geographic and meteorological conditions, making them potentially sensitive to small changes in precipitation or temperature. We investigate the potential application of stable isotope analysis to cloud forest dendroclimatology at Monteverde in Costa Rica in order to be able to extract both chronological...

Climate change is one of the major global issues commonly concerned by international communities. Taking the Three Gorges Reservoir which is the largest water conservancy project in China as the object, this study attempts to clarify the current conditions of water resources and water environment especially the spatial distribution characteristics of water resources amount and main non-point so...

1. Introduction In dry desert regions like the Southwest U.S., natural and human systems are particularly sensitive to variations in climate. The natural ecosystem of the Sonoran Desert is largely dependent on and adapted to monsoon precipitation, which is also needed to maintain water demand and agriculture from year to year. From a resource management perspective, the monsoon is relevant in t...

A bioclimate model predicting the presence or absence of aspen, Populus tremuloides, in western USA from climate variables was developed by using the Random Forests classification tree on Forest Inventory data from about 118,000 permanent sample plots. A reasonably parsimonious model used eight predictors to describe aspen’s climate profile. Classification errors averaged 4.5%, most of which we...

Water is an important resource for plant life. Since climate scenarios for Switzerland predict an average reduction of 20% in summer precipitation until 2070, understanding ecosystem responses to water shortage, e.g. in terms of plant productivity, is of major concern. Thus, we tested the effects of simulated summer drought on three managed grasslands along an altitudinal gradient in Switzerlan...

Reconstruction of pre-instrumental, late Holocene climate is important for understanding how climate has changed in the past and how climate might change in the future. Statistical prediction of paleoclimate from tree ring widths is challenging because tree ring widths are a one-dimensional summary of annual growth that represents a multi-dimensional set of climatic and biotic influences. We de...

The ERA15 Reanalysis (1979–1993) has been dynamically downscaled over Central Europe using 4 different regional climate models. The regional simulations were analysed with respect to 2m temperature and total precipitation, the main input parameters for hydrological applications. Model results were validated against three reference data sets (ERA15, CRU, DWD) and uncertainty ranges were derived....

Observed changes in climate of the U.S. Pacific Northwest since the early twentieth century were examined using four different datasets. Annual mean temperature increased by approximately 0.68–0.88C from 1901 to 2012, with corroborating indicators including a lengthened freeze-free season, increased temperature of the coldest night of the year, and increased growing-season potential evapotransp...

Precipitation and temperature drive many aspects of terrestrial ecosystem function. Climate change scenarios predict increasing precipitation variability and temperature, and long term experiments are required to evaluate the ecosystem consequences of interannual climate variation, increased growing season (intra-annual) rainfall variability, and warming. We present results from an experiment a...

Using 1km grid datasets representing monthly mean precipitation, monthly mean temperature, and dry matter production (DMP), we considered the regional plant production ability in Southeast and South Asia, and also employed pixel-by-pixel correlation analysis to assess the intensity of relation between climate factors and plant production. While annual DMP in South Asia was approximately less th...