The common versions (referred to as self-calibrated here) of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) are calibrated and then applied to the same weather series. Therefore, the distribution of the index values is about the same for any weather series. We introduce here the relative SPI and PDSI, abbreviated as rSPI and rPDSI. These are calibrated u...

31 Climate models are essential tools for assessing future climate change. In making predictions, it 32 is beneficial to examine simulations from various models that are developed at centers around the 33 world. The simple average over an ensemble of such models is often taken as the optimal 34 prediction, which in studies of current climate is demonstrated as being more accurate than 35 relyin...

The relationships among farmers’ belief in climate change, perceptions of climate-related risk, and use of climate adaptation practices is a growing topic of interest in U.S. scholarship. The northeast region is not well represented in the literature, although it is highly agricultural and will likely face climaterelated risks that differ from those faced in other regions. We used a mixed metho...

The economic costs of climate change can be large, or perhaps non-existent. We cannot tell before experiencing climate change, and thus the social cost of carbon is partly based on subjective beliefs. We take a dataset of estimates for the carbon price as a representation of beliefs, and develop a tractable stochastic climate-economy model that replicates the distribution of estimates. We use t...

Most general circulation models predict that most tropical forests will experience lower and less frequent rainfall in future as a result of climate change, which may reduce the capacity of fungal pathogens to drive density-dependent tree mortality. This is potentially significant because fungal pathogens are thought to play a key role in promoting and structuring plant diversity in tropical fo...

Determining organismal responses to climate change is one of biology's greatest challenges. Recent forecasts for future climates emphasize altered temperature variation and precipitation, but most studies of animals have largely focused on forecasting the outcome of changes in mean temperature. Theory suggests that extreme thermal variation and precipitation will influence species performance a...

Increasingly, ecological modellers are integrating paleodata with future projections to understand climate-driven biodiversity dynamics from the past through the current century. Climate simulations from earth system models are necessary to this effort, but must be debiased and downscaled before they can be used by ecological models. Downscaling methods and observational baselines vary among re...

Changes in precipitation could have crucial influences on the regional water resources in arid regions such as Xinjiang. It is necessary to understand the intrinsic multi-scale variations of precipitation in different parts of Xinjiang in the context of climate change. In this study, based on precipitation data from 53 meteorological stations in Xinjiang during 1960-2012, we investigated the in...

Why do areas with high numbers of small-range species occur where they do? We found that, for butterfly and plant species in Europe, and for bird species in the Western Hemisphere, such areas coincide with regions that have rare climates, and are higher and colder areas than surrounding regions. Species with small range sizes also tend to occur in climatically diverse regions, where species are...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The biomass-ratio hypothesis states that ecosystem properties are driven by the characteristics of dominant species in the community. In this study, the hypothesis was operationalized as community-weighted means (CWMs) of monoculture values and tested for predicting the decomposition of multispecies litter mixtures along an abiotic gradient in the field. METHODS Decomposit...