Forecasting the consequences of climate change is contingent upon our understanding of the relationship between biodiversity patterns and climatic variability. While the impacts of climate change on individual species have been well-documented, there is a paucity of studies on climate-mediated changes in community dynamics. Our objectives were to investigate the relationship between temporal tu...

Variations in tree-ring structure are simulated with (1) an empirical model using monthly climatic data as statistical predictors and (2) a mechanisbc model using daily climatic data as growth limiting conditions. The empirical model calibrates standardized ring-width and density chronologies of tree-rings with monthly temperature, precipitation or Palmer Drought Severity Index. The empirical m...

the vegetation covering of a region has a direct correlation with climate. so if data is available for vegetation cover, the second variable (climate) can be easily predicted and in reverse. the dominant species in a region are indication of its climatic conditions and vice versa. accordingly, this is of significance in the science of historical botany. fortunately, from the first millennium ad...

Large-scale fire danger assessment has become increasingly relevant in the past few years, and is usually based on weather information. Still, fuel characteristics also play an important role in fire behavior. This study presents a fire behavior simulation based on a global fuelbed dataset and climatic and topographic information. The simulation was executed using the Fuel Characteristic Classi...

Humans are increasingly influencing global climate and regional predator assemblages, yet a mechanistic understanding of how climate and predation interact to affect fluctuations in prey populations is currently lacking. Here we develop a modelling framework to explore the effects of different predation strategies on the response of age-structured prey populations to a changing climate. We show...

Variation in climatic conditions over space and time is thought to be an important driver of speciation. However, the role of climate has not been explored in the theoretical literature on speciation, and the theory underlying empirical studies of climate and speciation has come largely from informal, verbal models. In this study, we develop a quantitative model to test a relatively new but the...

Soil moisture influences and is influenced by water, climate, and ecosystem conditions, affecting associated ecosystem services in the landscape. This paper couples snow storage-melting dynamics with an analytical modeling approach to screening basin-scale, long-term soil moisture variability and change in a changing climate. This coupling enables assessment of both spatial differences and temp...

[1] We present a high-resolution climate record from a sediment core spanning an 80-kyr interval of time during the mid-Pliocene epoch, when warmer conditions and lower global ice volume prevailed worldwide. Oxygen and carbon isotope analyses were made on benthic and planktonic foraminifera from ODP Site 981 in the North Atlantic. The amplitude and approximate recurrence interval of suborbital ...

Climate change has been identified as the primary threat to the integrity and functioning of ecosystems in this century, although there is still much uncertainty about its effects and the degree of vulnerability for different ecosystems to this threat. Here we propose a new methodological approach capable of measuring and mapping the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems at large scales based on...