• Climate change could increase the frequency with which plants experience abiotic stresses, leading to changes in their metabolic pathways. These stresses may induce the production of compounds that are structurally and biologically different from constitutive compounds. • We studied how warming and altered precipitation affected the composition, structure, and biological reactivity of leaf li...

Drought and pests are primary abiotic and biotic factors proposed as selective filters acting on species distributions along rainfall gradients in tropical forests and may contribute importantly to species distributional limits, performance, and diversity gradients. Recent research demonstrates linkages between species distributions along rainfall gradients and physiological drought tolerance; ...

The causes of megafaunal extinctions in North America have been widely debated but remain poorly understood. Mammoths (Mammuthus spp.) in the American Southwest were hunted by Clovis people during a period of rapid climate change, just before the regional onset of Younger Dryas cooling and mammoth extirpation. Thus, these mammoths may provide key insights into late Pleistocene extinction proces...

1 The cover of plant species was recorded annually from 1988 to 2000 in nine spatially replicated plots in a species-rich, semi-natural meadow at Negrentino (southern Alps). This period showed large climatic variation and included the centennial maximum and minimum frequency of days with ≥ 10 mm of rain. 2 Changes in species composition were compared between three 4-year intervals characterized...

proportionality of wheat cultivars growth patterns to the area’s agro climatic condition will improve crop production. the objective of this study was identifying the phenology of a wide range of wheat varieties in iran, as well as evaluating the relationship between phenology and drought stress tolerance under late season drought stress. in this experiment, 36 wheat genotypes were studied unde...

Destructive fires in Amazonia have occurred in the past decade, leading to forest degradation, carbon emissions, impaired air quality, and property damage. Here, we couple climate, geospatial, and province-level census data, with farmer surveys to examine the climatic, demographic, and land use factors associated with fire frequency in the Peruvian Amazon from 2000 to 2010. Although our results...

Savanna tree-grass interactions may be particularly sensitive to climate change. Establishment of two tree canopy dominants, post oak (Quercus stellata) and eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana), grown with the dominant C4 perennial grass (Schizachyrium scoparium) in southern oak savanna of the United States were evaluated under four climatic scenarios for 6 years. Tree-grass interactions wer...

Drought is a normal, recurring feature of climate phenomena; it may occur virtually in all climatic regions. The effects of drought accumulate slowly and its impacts are spread over a larger geographical area than other natural hazards. Drought is a natural hazard originating from a deficiency of precipitation that result in a water shortage for some activities or some groups and is often assoc...

Growing and changing demands on water supply, along with natural climate variability and possible anthropogenically induced climate change, make water resource management and planning increasingly challenging, particularly in arid regions. Instrumental climate and gaged streamflow records provide just a snapshop of recent natural hydrologic variability. In this paper, we use tree-ring-based ann...