Sea-level rise is a major effect of climate change. It has drawn international attention, because higher sea levels in the future would cause serious impacts in various parts of the world. There are questions associated with sea-level rise which science needs to answer. To what extent did climate change contribute to sea-level rise in the past? How much will global mean sea level increase in th...

Determining the factors that influence the distribution of woody vegetation cover and resolving the sensitivity of woody vegetation cover to shifts in environmental forcing are critical steps necessary to predict continental-scale responses of dryland ecosystems to climate change. We use a 6-year satellite data record of fractional woody vegetation cover and an 11-year daily precipitation recor...

Understanding the eco-evolutionary dynamics of species under rapid climate change is vital for both accurate forecasting of biodiversity responses and for developing effective management strategies. Using an individual-based model we demonstrate that the presence and form (colour) of inter-annual variability in environmental conditions can impact the evolution of dispersal during range shifts. ...

Understanding the sensitivity of tundra vegetation to climate warming is critical to forecasting future biodiversity and vegetation feedbacks to climate. In situ warming experiments accelerate climate change on a small scale to forecast responses of local plant communities. Limitations of this approach include the apparent site-specificity of results and uncertainty about the power of short-ter...

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...

Phenology refers to the periodic appearance of life-cycle events and currently receives abundant attention as the effects of global change on phenology are so apparent. Phenology as a discipline observes these events and relates their annual variation to variation in climate. But phenology is also studied in other disciplines, each with their own perspective. Evolutionary ecologists study varia...

Climate indices help to describe the past, present, and the future climate. They are usually closer related to possible impacts and are therefore more illustrative to users than simple climate means. Indices are often based on daily data series and thresholds. It is shown that the percentile-based thresholds are sensitive to the method of computation, and so are the climatological daily mean an...

The Tasman Sea off southeast Australia exhibited its longest and most intense marine heatwave ever recorded in 2015/16. Here we report on several inter-related aspects of this event: observed characteristics, physical drivers, ecological impacts and the role of climate change. This marine heatwave lasted for 251 days reaching a maximum intensity of 2.9 °C above climatology. The anomalous warmin...

[1] Climate sensitivity has been subjectively estimated to be likely to lie in the range of 1.5–4.5 C, and this uncertainty contributes a substantial part of the total uncertainty in climate change projections over the coming century. Objective observationally-based estimates have so far failed to improve on this upper bound, with many estimates even suggesting a significant probability of clim...

Earth System Climate Models (ESCMs) are valuable tools that can be used to gain a better understanding of the climate system, global biogeochemical cycles and how anthropogenically-driven changes may affect them. Here we describe improvements made to the marine biogeochemical ecosystem component of the University of Victoria’s ESCM (version 2.9). Major changes include corrections to the code an...