Climatic niche models for invasive plants are usually constructed with occurrence records taken from literature and collections. Because these data neither discriminate among life-cycle stages of plants (adult or juvenile) nor the origin of individuals (naturally established or man-planted), the resulting models may mispredict the distribution ranges of these species. We propose that more accur...

Climate change is considered to be a significant influence for infectious disease risk in Western Europe. Climatic and non-climatic developments act together resulting in current and future infectious disease risk. This study uses a survey to explore Dutch expert perspectives on climate change induced infectious disease risk. The results show that the experts consider temperature change, precip...

Recently there has been increased interest within the U.S. Navy in the use of climatology-based products to support the planning and execution of military operations. Climatological databases of atmospheric features that impact electromagnetic (EM) propagation have been developed to provide guidance on weapons and sensor system performance for expected environmental conditions. However, the mar...

The 30 th anniversary of NCL, the New Zealand controlled environment laboratory, was marked on 20 March 2000. This anniversary opens the fourth decade of service by NCL to researchers in New Zealand and internationally. Looking forward into this decade provides the stimulus for this workshop series, focused on current issues in controlled environment (CE) science. The workshop series is designe...

Weather and climate prediction rely on inherently different predictors at different time scales. Some of the variability in precipitation on climate time-scales (i.e., interannual) could be attributed to accumulated noise on weather (i.e., daily) time-scales. To determine a lower bound on how much climate variability is due to processes at climate time-scales, weather generator models with no m...

To generate realistic projections of species' responses to climate change, we need to understand the factors that limit their ability to respond. Although climatic niche conservatism, the maintenance of a species's climatic niche over time, is a critical assumption in niche-based species distribution models, little is known about how universal it is and how it operates. In particular, few studi...

Rapid climatic change poses a threat to global biodiversity. There is extensive evidence that recent climatic change has affected animal and plant populations, but no indicators exist that summarise impacts over many species and large areas. We use data on long-term population trends of European birds to develop such an indicator. We find a significant relationship between interspecific variati...

Recent climatic changes have enhanced plant growth in northern mid-latitudes and high latitudes. However, a comprehensive analysis of the impact of global climatic changes on vegetation productivity has not before been expressed in the context of variable limiting factors to plant growth. We present a global investigation of vegetation responses to climatic changes by analyzing 18 years (1982 t...

This review paper summarizes recent research work on abrupt climatic changes and oscillations. The climatic system is viewed as a dissipative, highly non-linear system, under non-equilibrium conditions, and, as such, should be expected to have some unusual properties. These unusual properties include bifurcation points with marked instability just before the point, magnification of semi-periodi...