The report released by the Intergovernmental Committee for Climate Change indicates that Romania ranks among the top seven countries in Europe that would be strongly impacted by aridity in the next few years, with climate changes consisting in a rise of average annual temperatures by as much as 5°C. The research work was conducted in the South of the Oltenia South-Western Development Region, wh...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Broad surveys have detected inverse relationships between seed and adult longevity and between seed size and adult longevity. However, low and unpredictable precipitation is also associated with seed bank (SB) expression in semi-arid and arid areas. The relationship between adult longevity, SB formation, seed mass and aridity is examined in annual and perennial herbs of Chae...

We use the oxygen isotopic composition of tooth enamel from multiple mammalian taxa across eastern Africa to present a proxy for aridity. Here we report tooth enamel delta(18)O values of 14 species from 18 locations and classify them according to their isotopic sensitivity to environmental aridity. The species are placed into two groups, evaporation sensitive (ES) and evaporation insensitive (E...

31 Although the relationship between the aboveground net primary production (ANPP) and species 32 diversity (SR) have been widely reported, there is considerable disagreement about the fitting 33 patterns of SR–ANPP, which has been variously described as ‘positive’, ‘negative’, ‘unimodal’, 34 ‘U-shaped’ and so on. Not surprisingly, the effect-factors including precipitation, aridity index and 3...

Leaf-wax hydrogen isotope composition (dDwax) is increasingly applied as a proxy for hydroclimate variability in tropical paleoclimate archives, but the factors controlling dDwax in the tropics remain poorly understood. We measured dDwax and the stable carbon isotope composition of leaf-waxes (dCwax), including both n-alkanes and n-alkanoic acids, from modern lake sediments and soils across a m...

Mars' wet-to-dry transition is a major environmental catastrophe, yet the spatial pattern, tempo, and cause of drying are poorly constrained. We built globally-distributed database constraints on Mars late-stage paleolake size relative to catchment area (aridity index), found evidence for climate zonation as was out. Aridity increased over time in southern midlatitude highlands, where lakes bec...