76 JOURNAL OF NATURAL RESOURCES & LIFE SCIENCES EDUCATION VOLUME 36 2007 A working knowledge of climatic patterns and processes is an important tool for range managers in the southwestern United States. High variability in temperature and precipitation patterns require that climatic conditions be considered when implementing best management practices. It is widely accepted that the earth’s clim...

Bridging the gap between the predictions of coarse-scale climate models and the fine-scale climatic reality of species is a key issue of climate change biology research. While it is now well known that most organisms do not experience the climatic conditions recorded at weather stations, there is little information on the discrepancies between microclimates and global interpolated temperatures ...

Climate is a driver of biotic systems. It affects individual fitness, population dynamics, distribution and abundance of species, and ecosystem structure and function. Regional variation in climatic regimes creates selective pressures for the evolution of locally adapted physiologies, morphological adaptations (e.g., color patterns, surface textures, body shapes and sizes), and behavioral adapt...

We examined the phylogenetic history of Linaria with special emphasis on the Mediterranean sect. Supinae (44 species). We revealed extensive highly supported incongruence among two nuclear (ITS, AGT1) and two plastid regions (rpl32-trnL(UAG), trnS-trnG). Coalescent simulations, a hybrid detection test and species tree inference in *BEAST revealed that incomplete lineage sorting and hybridizatio...

The Brazilian Amazon occupies 5 million km and comprehends the largest preserved and continuous tropical rain forest in the world: a forested area of approximately 4 million km. In the last decades, the region has experimented intense transformation processes both in the physical and human aspects. Deforestation studies estimated a rate of 25 400 km of forest conversion for 2001 to 2002 period ...

Solar ultraviolet (UV) irradiance is a key driver of climatic and biotic change. Ultraviolet irradiance modulates stratospheric warming and ozone production, and influences the biosphere from ecosystem-level processes through to the largest scale patterns of diversification and extinction. Yet our understanding of ultraviolet irradiance is limited because no method has been validated to reconst...

Tree rings are natural archives of climate and environmental information with a yearly resolution. Indeed, wood anatomical, chemical, and other properties of tree rings are a synthesis of several intrinsic and external factors, and their interaction during tree growth. In particular, Intra-Annual Density Fluctuations (IADFs) can be considered as tree-ring anomalies that can be used to better un...

Climatic controls on fluvial landscapes are commonly characterized in terms of mean annual precipitation. However, physical erosion processes are driven by extreme events and are therefore more directly related to the intensity, duration, and frequency of individual rainfall events. Climate also influences erosional processes indirectly by controlling vegetation. In this study, we explore how i...

Important interactions between climatic parameters and herbicide toxicity have been discussed in the literature. As climate changes are expected to influence the growth conditions of aquatic photosynthetic organisms over the next century by modifying the physicochemical parameters of the environment (such as temperature and incident light characteristics), the following questions arise: How wil...

Culicoides imicola is the main vector of the bluetongue virus in theMediterranean Basin. Spatial distribution models for this species traditionally employ either climatic data or remotely sensed data, or a combination of both. Until now, however, no studies compared the accuracies of C. imicola distribution models based on climatic versus remote sensing data, even though remotely sensed dataset...