Climate change can modify ecological interactions, but whether it can have cascading effects throughout ecological networks of multiple interacting species remains poorly studied. Climate-driven alterations in the intensity of plant-herbivore interactions may have particularly profound effects on the larger community because plants provide habitat for a wide diversity of organisms. Here we show...

SYNOPSIS Few studies have quantified the relative importance of direct effects of climate change on communities versus indirect effects that are mediated thorough species interactions, and the limited evidence is conflicting. Trait-based approaches have been popular in studies of climate change, but can they be used to estimate direct versus indirect effects? At the species level, thermal toler...

1. Increases in global temperatures have created concern about effects of climatic variability on populations, and climate has been shown to affect population dynamics in an increasing number of species. Testing for effects of climate on population densities across a species' distribution allows for elucidation of effects of climate that would not be apparent at smaller spatial scales. 2. Using...

Climate change has the potential to influence the earth's biological systems, however, its effects on human health are not well defined. Developing nations with limited resources are expected to face a host of health effects due to climate change, including vector-borne and water-borne diseases such as malaria, cholera, and dengue. This article reviews common and prevalent infectious diseases i...

The authors extracted from the PubMed and ScienceDirect bibliographic databases all articles published between 1998 and 2009 that were relevant to climate change and food- and waterborne diseases. Any material within each article that provided information about a relevant pathogen and its relationship with climate and climate change was summarized as a key fact, entered into a relational knowle...

In spite of the increasing number of studies on the importance of transgenerational plasticity for species response to novel environments, its effects on species ability to respond to climate change are still largely unexplored. We study the importance of transgenerational plasticity for response of a clonal species Festuca rubra. Individuals from four natural populations representing two level...

Understanding how climate change may influence forest carbon (C) budgets requires knowledge of forest growth relationships with regional climate, long-term forest succession, and past and future disturbances, such as wildfires and timber harvesting events. We used a landscape-scale model of forest succession, wildfire, and C dynamics (LANDIS-II) to evaluate the effects of a changing climate (A2...

There is ample evidence for ecological responses to recent climate change. Most studies to date have concentrated on the effects of climate change on individuals and species, with particular emphasis on the effects on phenology and physiology of organisms as well as changes in the distribution and range shifts of species. However, responses by individual species to climate change are not isolat...

1 Abstract Changes in the frequency, duration, and severity of climate extremes are forecast to occur under global climate change. The impacts of climate extremes on forest productivity and health are complicated by potential interactions with disturbance events and forest stand dynamics. Such interactions may lead to non-linear forest growth responses to climate and disturbance involving thres...